


Side by Side

by greygerbil



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-08-18 22:21:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8178263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: Rafael Barba and his old childhood friend Eddie Garcia decide to stay in contact after the events of the New York mayoral election blow over. Eddie's interest in Rafael changes, however, and Rafael has to get used to that as well as the fact that he is also starting to become involved in the life of Eddie's little son, Manuel. Meanwhile, their jobs intrude on their lives with dangerous consequences.





	1. Chapter 1

At the risk of sounding callous towards the victims, Rafael could admit he was thankful for the amount of cases he had been able to bury himself under. There was an ongoing investigation into a child pornography ring SVU was running, plus a rape case he was to take to court next week; homicide, in crisis mode as usual with too many dead people and too few personnel at every stage of the legal process, had needed an extra A.D.A. for a sketchy attempted murder-suicide where only the murder-part of the equation had worked out; finally, he was helping out colleagues from white collar crimes figure out a web of clandestine business trips to brothels in Mexico.

Combined, the workload mostly kept him from checking the papers to see what new insult for Rafael Alex had pulled out of his box of rhetorical toys today. While whatever came from him directly was by far more hurtful, the stories growing around the quotes didn’t make for a fun time, either. For two weeks, way past the election Alex had predictably lost, the media had been gleefully spreading the results of the SVU’s investigation over every empty column that needed filling. The reporters that bemoaned Alex’s loss detailed the many ways in which he had and would have helped the city, getting ever more utopian in their descriptions of a future with Mayor Muñoz, and made Rafael feel bad; the reporters that were quietly smug that some runaway guy from the Bronx, without any pedigree or the right connections, had proven himself to be just as without morals as they had suspected him (and by association _his kind_ ) to be made Rafael feel sick.

All in all, it was a good day to be stuck in the office at ten o’clock at night. He sipped his lukewarm coffee and picked up a red marker to go through the cost sheets for the Mexican ‘business trips’ again, the steady stream of noise outside his windows a familiar backdrop, the splatter of rain against the window pane and the hum of motors interspersed with the occasional abrupt honk and shrill bicycle bell.

Just as he had managed leave all thoughts of Alex behind him and lose himself in a column listing hotel bills, there was a knock at the door. He raised his head, frowning. His secretary Carmen had gone home hours ago.

“Come in?”

Mr. Wrenham, the nightwatchman, opened his door, followed by Eddie.

“See, I was right,” Mr. Wrenham told Eddie, looking over his shoulder, before he turned back to Rafael. “Got a visitor for you, Mr. Barba,” he said. “Not too late, is it? He says he’s a friend.”

Setting aside his surprise, Rafael pushed himself up by the arms of his chair. “No, no, that’s alright. Thank you, Mr. Wrenham.”

The nightwatchman nodded his head and walked out again, whistling off-key on his way. Eddie looked uncomfortable as he stood on the threshold, like he wasn’t sure what would happen if he set foot in the room. When Rafael approached him, however, he raised his calloused hand to grasp his and briefly pull him closer for a one-armed hug, then entered so Rafael could close the door.

“Is everything okay?” Rafael asked. There was a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. Late night visit, that expression, those were foreboding signs. His mind rebelled at the idea that Eddie might want to see how far he could push his connection with Rafael, just like Alex and Yelina had tried to do, but Rafael had set the precedent by getting him that deal, so if he did, it was his own fault as well. Instinctively, he found it hard to imagine Eddie was that calculating, but then, Eddie wouldn’t be the first friend he’d been wrong about.

“I was just in the neighbourhood to pick up a few things for a buddy. He broke up with his girlfriend. It was messy, apparently, so they didn’t wanna meet.” He pointed over his shoulder at a backpack. Its fabric, covered in dirt stains and threadbare at points, stretched to contain its contents. “Then I passed by and saw there was a watchman having a cigarette on the steps. Thought he could tell me where I can make an appointment,” Eddie said, picking at the sleeve of his red hoodie. “He told me you were still upstairs.”

“Eddie, you don’t need an appointment to come see me,” Rafael said.

“Yeah...” Eddie’s glance swiped over the heavy oak wood desk, the flags in the back of the room, the bookcase with the leather-bound issues. He didn’t sound convinced.

There was a long pause. Rafael took a deep, silent breath. Best get it out there.

“Are you in trouble?”

“What?” As if startled out of a trance, Eddie’s gaze snapped back to him. He stared. “No – I just wanted to talk.”

“Of course.”

Now it seemed unfair that he had doubted Eddie. Or maybe it was too early to say that? Rafael habitually turned to his desk, then realised he didn’t want that slab of wood with the files piled high on it between them. Instead, he gestured towards the round table in the corner and took a seat. Eddie followed his example, sliding the backpack from his shoulder.

“You have a nice office,” he told him.

“Thank you,” Rafael said warily. After hearing his name used as a synonym for the little pet of New York’s bourgeoisie, lambasted by every community organiser and social worker who could find a microphone or voice recorder to whine into as a jealous pedant, traitor, and heartless opportunist, he wasn’t sure how to take that. “I spend fifteen hours of my day here, so it should look good,” he added.

That brought a small smile to Eddie’s face. “You always work this late, Rafi?”

“Only most of the time.”

“Can’t imagine that’s healthy,” Eddie said, still smiling. His deep, dark brown eyes were still the same, and his smile, too, though it now crinkled the skin around his eyes in a way it hadn’t when he’d been younger.

Though they’d met over the years, Rafael still remembered him best from when he’d been a child and a teenager. He considered him closely at that moment, taking in the figure dressed in a hoodie, jeans, old sneakers. What did he really know about Eddie now?

“I wanted to apologise,” Eddie said, into the silence.

“Apologise?” Rafael narrowed his eyes.

“I’ve seen the news. Alex is really dragging you through the mud. This isn’t what I wanted.”

“He didn’t spare you, either.”

That had been another good reason not to turn on a TV recently. Hearing Alex talk about him was one thing, but that he kept trying to push Eddie’s guilt made Rafael’s blood boil. Rafael had experience handling a media circus and if he’d wanted to get involved, he could have found ways to make his voice heard – not that he planned on doing anything so extraordinarily stupid, but he had the option. Eddie, however, didn’t have the same opportunities as they did. He was just a convenient bull’s eye to take aim at and Alex damn well knew it.

Eddie simply gave a shrug.

“People’ll forget. I mean, I’m not an important guy. But you have a career here.”

“I knew what I was doing. It wasn’t going to end well no matter which choice I made,” Rafael said. Whether it was more pleasant to walk into a disaster with eyes wide open was another question entirely, but the result wasn’t unexpected. “And Alex was still our friend. I understand if you don’t find it funny hearing him talk like that even if it doesn’t affect your job. I certainly don’t.” He shook his head. “But that’s not your fault, Eddie.”

“Yeah, but I did something fucking stupid, didn’t I?”

The earnestness in his voice gave Rafael pause. Somehow, hearing an expletive in this room was incongruous, but Eddie was also right. Suddenly, he had to chuckle.

“A _really_ stupid thing, _hermano_ ,” he agreed, quietly, leaning back in his chair.

The way Eddie’s dark gaze scanned his face was careful. “You’re not mad at me?”

“No. Yes. I’m mad that you got yourself in trouble because I know you know better. But,” he glanced out the window into the night, which was never truly dark here in the city, “Alex probably knew which buttons to press. He tried it on me, too.“ Another pause. “Yelina and he both did.”

“Yelina?” Eddie asked.

Rafael looked at him and was suddenly grateful he was here, someone to listen who didn’t need it explained to him why Yelina’s involvement was an especially painful detail. He’d made it a habit never to reveal too much, but Eddie already knew.

“She tried to work me to tell her about the investigation. When I didn’t budge to niceties she accused me of a personal vendetta. It – made me realise how long it’s been since I’ve really talked to her. She said Alex didn’t send her, but I’m not sure I believe that.”

Yelina was absolutely her own woman enough to go find out why her husband was visited by police officers even if he wouldn’t tell her, but their tactics had been so similar: go in friendly first and if that didn’t work, take the smile off and reach for the jugular with a guilt-trip.

“She really might have thought of it on her own, you know,” Eddie said. At Rafael’s look, he shrugged his shoulders. “I mean, she was pretty good with all the campaign stuff...”

“... and this was politics,” Rafael finished for him, feeling his chest tighten.

Slowly, Eddie nodded his head.

That was what he and Eddie had been delegated to in the minds of Alex and Yelina: Friends if possible, bodies to step over if necessary. And that was the clue, wasn’t it? The Yelina he remembered was brilliant, tricksy, but honest and fiercely proud. The woman he’d met, however, was a politician – not a breed of people he’d ever found palatable – and Rafael had stopped being in the small circle these types usually had that they’d put their neck out for. That made him expandable, someone to use, just how Eddie had been ultimately expandable to Alex. He didn’t think they’d wanted to throw them under the bus, didn’t even think they’d disliked them, but Rafael’s and Eddie’s fall had been a risk New York’s favourite power couple had been willing to take. Who cared if Rafael lost his job talking about the charges to her or Alex, and was it really important whether Eddie went to jail? No, not in the great scheme of things. Not if the damn election was won. Rafael and Eddie were supposed to be loyal or they were bad people, but Yelina and Alex knowingly putting them in terrible positions wasn’t a sign of disloyalty, of course.

However, the snare of imagined obligations that had closed so tightly around Eddie was not one Rafael had been willing to put around his neck. After all, he’d never been as good or trusting a person as Eddie – which was still the better survival strategy, as it turned out.

“Do you still like her?” Eddie asked into the silence.

“Yelina?” Rafael straightened. He hadn’t expected such a personal question, but Eddie had always been a straight talker. “I think I liked the idea of what I remembered of her. But the last time we really spent time together, we were seventeen, which is... a lot longer ago than it feels.” He smiled humourlessly. “And let’s not pretend I was an objective observer then, either.” Before anything more than a few kisses had passed between them, Alex had moved in and she’d made her choice. Since the relationship had never had to run the rocky path of reality and instead remained half-remembered as a teenager’s sappy fantasy, was it any wonder he’d had to face an ear-piercing wake-up call? “I still think she deserves better than what Alex is doing, but... I don’t think she’s who I thought she was. Of course, I wish her all the best regardless.”

It sounded like a goodbye and as he was finished, he realised that in a way, it was.

“Yeah, I think I know what you mean,” Eddie said slowly. With one hand, he was turning the scratched gold band on his finger. 

Rafael hesitated briefly. Eddie hadn’t held back with his question, so he guessed the same was fair for him.

“I can see that.”

For a moment, Eddie just looked at him, uncomprehending, only realising what he was doing with his hands when Rafael pointedly dropped his gaze. Quickly, he balled his left hand up into a fist, pulling it down onto his lap.

“Have you heard anything from her?”

 _Your wife? Your ex-wife?_ Rafael was not sure which word applied in Eddie’s mind.

“No. A friend told me she’s moved in with her new boyfriend now. She’s pregnant.”

That was about as final an end of a marriage as could be.

“I’m sorry.”

“You know, if it was just about us – but she doesn’t want to see Manny at all. Now she’s gonna have another kid. It’s almost like she’s replacing him.” Rapping his knuckles against the table in a nervous rhythm, Eddie shook his head. “I just didn’t think it’d all turn out like this. I always wanted our family to stay together, not like what happened with my parents.”

Rafael leaned over the table towards him.

“And you didn’t leave your son like your dad did, did you? You can’t control what other people do, only what you do.”

“What if she left because of me, though? She must’ve been unhappy.”

“That still wouldn’t give her the right to pretend Manuel doesn’t exist.”

The back and forth felt as initimately, distractingly familiar as a déjà vue; his own quick, clipped speech next to Eddie’s raspy drawl. Of course, Eddie had hardly ever looked so defeated back in the day.

Rafael got up. “Are you driving?”

“No, I’m here by bus,” Eddie said, looking confused. “You need a ride?”

“No,” Rafael said, corner of his mouth twitching. He leaned down and opened one of his cabinets, unearthing a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. “But I think you need a drink.” And, incidentally, so did he, since about nine in the morning.

Eddie smiled again.

“I didn’t know they allowed attorneys to have booze in their offices.”

Carefully, Rafael filled the glasses to about half and carried them back to the table, placing one in front of Eddie as he sat down.

“You assume I asked someone for permission.”

Eddie looked at him for a moment, almost curious. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel like you’ve changed much at all, Rafi.”

“Probably not as much as I should have,” Rafael admitted, smiling lopsidedly. He raised his glass. “ _Salud_.”

“ _Salud_ ,”

They drank and sat their glasses down. Rafael stretched out his legs under the table, idly watching the pulsating wisps of light that a police car threw up to his window. He listened to the muffled sound of the siren and felt the warm sting of alcohol creeping down his throat. Opposite him, Eddie downed half of the whiskey in one gulp. In the companionable silence that stretched between them, it felt like Rafael was breathing freely for the first time in weeks.

“How did it work out for you at Rikers?” he asked Eddie.

“My boss says he’ll keep me, since I didn’t get charged. He says he trusts me.”

There was a little pride in his voice. Rafael agreed with Eddie’s boss that Eddie could be relied on not to do the same things he’d done for Alex for random inmates. At the same time, he knew that if Eddie hadn’t been a childhood friend but just a random guard whose record had happened to fall into his hands, he’d once again be rolling his eyes at Riker’s lax treatment of their own people.

So much for impartiality.

Eddie noticed his pause, expression clouding with confusion. In order not to start an unnecessary fight, Rafael said, by way of explaining his quiet with something that wasn’t quite a lie: “That’s good, but C.O. is a dangerous job, especially for a single father.” 

“You think I can’t handle it?”

Eddie was bristling a bit. It almost made Rafael smile. He still knew that streak of his, too.

“It’s probably easier not to get beat up without _someone_ there getting you in trouble with kids twice your size.” Rafael smirked. “Still, it’s not a senior club you’re supervising.”

“I don’t want to do it forever, but I have to do something or I can’t feed my family.”

“Of course,” Rafael said. They both had grown up in a place where many people were happy to have _any_ job. It was not like Rafael had forgotten that.

“Besides, the way some of these guys talk about the people who got them there, feels like _you_ might have a more dangerous job,” Eddie pointed out. “Most of them don’t stay forever. What if someone shows up at your door?”

Rafael took a sip of whiskey and let the remaining liquid spin in the glass with a slow movement of his wrist. Since he had a collection of threatening letters from any number of perps, their families, friends, neighbours and possibly dogs in his possession, that was something he was well-aware of and tried not to think about for the sake of his sanity.

“It’s fine, I don’t leave the office much, anyway,” he deflected.

Seemed like Eddie remembered something of how Rafael reacted, too. He raised a brow at him, displeased, even though he let the topic drop.

“Rikers is not always as dangerous as it sounds when you hear about it on the news,” he said, instead, after emptying his glass. “Today, the worst we had was a food fight in the hallway to the cafeteria.”

Rafael raised a brow. “Oh, pardon me, so it’s not a senior club but more of a kindergarten?”

“You’d think, right? That’s what happens when people can’t use actual weapons.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I was at a lunch with colleagues from Narcotics today and since there’s going to be a promotion that both think they deserve and they aren’t allowed to pull knives on each other, either, I was waiting for food to start flying as well. Which, by the way, wouldn’t have been much of a waste, considering we were doing wheatgrass shots.”

“You _drank_ grass? Why?”

“I don’t know, you will have to ask one of my more cultivated colleagues. I just know that by the end of the meal I wanted to go to McDonalds.”

Grinning, Eddie shook his head. Rafael was not one to hide his distaste as a general rule, but talking to Eddie left his tongue looser. It felt like everyone he talked to these days was law personnel, bureaucrats, politicians or assorted spouses; people who’d met him as A.D.A. Barba, used to the image he’d constructed for himself, well-dressed, poised, just the way Rafael liked it. For better or worse, however, Eddie would still remember him with bloody knees and a runny nose, ten cent freeze pop from the _bodega_ dripping on his old t-shirt.

“We should go – eat something together,” Eddie said. “Real food. You know, if you’ve a free evening sometime.”

“I’d like that,” Rafael said, without thinking.

“I got a new number.”

As usual, Rafael’s phone was in his pocket, one slip of his hand away, which was about as far as he was comfortable to let it be removed from him. The entry ‘Eduardo Garcia’ sat snug between a fellow A.D.A. and a police officer after he had created it.

Reaching into his bag, Eddie unearthed his own phone from between balled up shirts and a few books, probably the spoils of the break-up he had talked about. The smartphone was old and the upper left corner cracked into a circular spider web. After tapping his thumb onto the screen a few times, he exchanged phones with him. Rafael halted a moment as he saw that Eddie had simply titled his own entry ‘Rafi’, then typed his cell phone and landline number both.

“I’ll call you when I have my schedule at work for next week,” Eddie said, as he got up. “If you don’t mind staying up late, we could go after I got Manny to bed.”

“I think I can outlast a seven-year-old,” Rafael said, raising to his feet as well, belatedly realising seven was just a guess – but, considering Eddie didn’t react, a lucky one.

On his way to the door, Eddie stopped once more, hand already hovering over the handle.

“I also wanted to tell you... thanks for looking out for me, Rafi.”

Obviously Eddie meant well, but that phrase was beginning to raise Rafael’s hackles after the way Alex had pushed it onto him. He shook his head. “ _De nada_ ,” he said, abruptly.

Eddie wasn’t dissuaded. “I know that you went out on a limb for me with the police when you didn’t have to. My lawyer said I wouldn’t have gotten a deal like that without your help.”

“Friends in high places,” Rafael said. “It’s okay, Eddie. You’re not in my debt. We’re still even.”

Right now, the last thing he wanted was another friendship that included more nebulous obligations, or feel like some sort of benefactor. It didn’t use to be like that with him and Eddie and seeing their relationship twist into something so complicated and conditional would have been devastating.

Nodding his head, Eddie adjusted the strap of his backpack. After a moment of silent hesitation, he stepped forward and closed his arms around Rafael, muscles like steel cords tightening against his shoulders, one hand brushing against his back before it settled on his side. Rafael could smell the rain on Eddie mixed with a pleasant, musty scent from the old hoodie, which he could appreciate intimately, seeing as Eddie’s stranglehold left Rafael’s face pressed against his shoulder. A moment too late, he overcame his surprise and, with his arms locked against his ribcage, awkwardly moved his hand to pat Eddie’s back.

When Eddie let him go, Rafael exhaled sharply, then gasped in breath.

“Sorry,” Eddie said.

“It’s fine,” Rafael answered, nonchalantly, “I have more ribs where those came from.”

Eddie chuckled, a low, coarse noise. Only when he did Rafael noticed that it was the first time this evening he’d heard him laugh.

“I’ll see you soon, Rafi.”

After the door had closed behind Eddie, Rafael strolled back to the window, straightening his vest. The rain against his glass cast the outside world in a strange, otherworldly hue of dark mixing with the blurring borders of multicoloured glares down on the road and in the windows across the street. He imagined Eddie out there, hood pulled over his head, and remembered the two of them walking to school in the late fall, at dark November mornings indistinguishable from a November evening such as this. His childhood hadn’t had much in it that tempted him to romanticise it, but he did remember feeling untouchable when Eddie was by his side. The fear and anger had subsided in those moments, which, considering that at home he was at the mercy of his father’s moods, was a rare treat.

Shaking his head, he glanced back at his desk. The alcohol on an empty stomach, the result of skipping dinner, had left him a little tipsy and his mind had long shifted away from rows and rows of numbers. It was time to call it a night.


	2. Chapter 2

On his way to East Burnside Avenue, Rafael passed by the playground where he had met Eddie during the Alex debacle. Despite the cold that had driven him to hasten his steps before, he tarried. Though there was now an actual playground as opposed to the sad collection of iron bars and splintered wooden planks that they used to play on as children, he could still see teenagers hanging around passing beer bottles between them.

In a strange moment of out-of-body experience, he saw himself sitting on the ground, rubbing his cold, bony fingers together as he watched Alex and Eddie kick around an empty soda can while he leafed through the last pages of a book. He couldn’t place the memory, couldn’t say if he was twelve or sixteen, couldn’t really make out faces in the image in his mind to guess by the age of his friends or even remember what book he had been so eager to finish. But he remembered the cold creeping down his neck; the clatter and scraping of thin can metal against stone; how hard it was to read in the dim light of the street lamp; the dislocated feeling of really being nowhere, but having nowhere else to return to, either – with home, where his dad was, not providing much comfort –, yet still happy in the company of his friends.

Briefly, his gaze strayed to the small group of kids loitering around the swing set, pushing each other off, shouting, laughing. Maybe it was the same for them, or maybe they were one of the gangs or a group of dealers. Those had existed in his youth, too. Just because he was getting melancholic didn’t mean he wasn’t still a realist.

He had probably met Eddie on this playground, Rafael thought. They’d only become fast friends in first grade, but Rafael couldn’t remember a time in his life when he hadn’t known Eddie Garcia. The kids of the neighbourhood had congregated in this place even back in the day. Though it hadn’t been much of a playground, then, the parents had liked it when their children were at least vaguely collected in one spot. As he thought about it, details came back to him. He remembered Eddie hadn’t liked to wear shoes until he was forced to do so in school and that his black hair had always been a few inches too long, hanging over his dark eyes so that he constantly had his hands in his face pushing it away, leaving smears of dirt on his forehead. His left front tooth had fallen prey to a curb during a brawl, so he didn’t have one for a couple of years, until the new one grew to fill the gap.

They must have played together in groups before, maybe there had even been conversations he’d forgotten, but the first time Rafael remembered them talking one on one, they had been four or five years old and he had been watching Eddie jealously as he did a whole set of gymnastics on the rust-stained monkey bars with unfair ease. When Eddie had spotted him, he had scooted to the side so there’d be room for Rafael to play, but though he had jumped to reach the bar, hoping against hope this was the time he’d make it, his fingertips had only just brushed the cold metal as usual. After a few of his futile attempts, Eddie had suddenly landed next to him, naked feet hitting the ground with a thud. Without asking, he had put his skinny arms around Rafael’s middle from behind. For the next jump, he had given him a boost. He had grinned at him when Rafael had finally managed to grab onto the bar and Rafael had felt proud as he was dangling there like a ripe fruit.

“ _Gracias_ ,” Rafael had said, holding on tightly.

“ _De nada_.”

With his front tooth missing, Eddie had had a little lisp. He had easily pulled himself up to sit on the bar and then let himself fall backwards, only holding on with his legs, arms swinging free, his head on height with Rafael’s knees as he grinned up at him.

Several of the teenagers were starting to look Rafael’s way as he stood there rooted to the spot, and Rafael quickly turned and strode away. The last thing he needed tonight was to get into a fight with a couple of seventeen year olds that would, embarrassingly enough, probably manage to beat him fair and square. He suppressed a brief smile at the thought, since that, too, reminded him of the past. With Eddie in tow, he had never needed to worry about a few teenaged rowdies, even when they had both been children. The more things changed, and all that. He glanced at his wristwatch and picked up his pace.

-

“Rafael, it’s so good to see you again.”

With a winning smile, Rafael offered Eddie’s mother the bouquet he had bought at a shop just outside the subway station, a bunch of red and yellow autumn flowers. Maria was a tiny woman, so frail that she seemed to be made from nothing but bone and skin, and after taking the flowers, she briefly wrapped her arms around him.

“They’re beautiful. You shouldn’t have. Come in, come in!”

Even after all these years, she spoke only Spanish and he answered in kind.

“Thank you for the invitation.”

“Always, Rafael, you know that. How is your mother? Your grandmother? I just met Catalina the other day at church.”

“Then you know more than me, Mrs. Garcia. I spoke to her last week. My mother is mostly at work, as usual. A lot of exams coming up, as I understand.”

“She’s always working, Lucia! The two of you are really made from one wood,” Maria said, shaking her head with an indulgent smile. Wispy grey hair fell down to her shoulders.

“Hey, Rafi. Sorry that I didn’t come to the door. There’s a pipe in our bathroom that’s acting up.”

Padding in from the small hallway leading into the back of the apartment, Eddie joined them. He was barefoot, in jogging trousers and a wifebeater that might once upon a time have been white, but now had settled on the uneven colour of dust, the outfit splattered liberally with water. Behind him, Manuel darted into the living room, in blue pyjamas with some sort of cartoon robot on the front.

“Hello Rafael,” he said.

“Hello Manuel. You’ve grown a lot since I’ve last seen you,” he told him, because generally kids seemed to like hearing how tall they were and since the last time he had really met Manuel had been two years ago, he wasn’t lying, either. It was impressive Manuel still knew his name at all. His father had probably told him he’d drop by.

“I grew an inch since the last summer holidays,” Manuel declared. He, too, spoke Spanish, but Rafael knew for a fact that Eddie had been very insistent on him growing up bilingual, after how hard elementary school had been on himself. After all, Eddie couldn’t rely on the fact that Manuel would befriend an entirely too stubborn kid who made it his mission to teach Manuel to speak English, like Eddie himself had found in Rafael.

“That inch was his toes,” Eddie said, smile gentle as he ruffled Manuel’s hair.

One of the few things that Rafael knew about kids was that they were susceptible to bribes. If Manuel had to do the whole awkward-conversation-with-the-family-friend thing, which Rafael had hated as a child, he should at least be compensated. From the pockets of his coat, he pulled a package of gummi bears, which Manuel snatched away eagerly when he held it to him.

“Manny, you’re forgetting something.”

There was rebuke in Eddie’s tone. The boy blinked, remembering himself.

“Thanks!”

“No problem.”

“You can have some tomorrow,” Maria told Manuel. “Now say good night. I’ll bring you to bed.” She turned to Rafael. “The food is on the stove.”

“If Eddie hasn’t fixed the pipe yet, I’ll help him first,” Rafael said. Not that he had anything substantial to add to home repairs. Still, he was here to talk to Eddie, so he wouldn’t sit in the kitchen on his own while the whole family was otherwise occupied.

“Hurry up, then! Don’t keep Rafael waiting.” Maria told Eddie.

Rafael was surprised at the sudden force in her voice. She had never been sugar-sweet, per se, but usually she didn’t snap at Eddie without a reason. Perhaps age had not changed her for the better. 

After Manuel had hugged his father and waved at Rafael, he ran off, Maria following him. They vanished behind a door that, when opened, revealed two beds on opposite sides of a cramped room and a small bookcase overflowing with messy school folders and plastic toys. Eddie, too, looked after them for a second before he refocused on Rafael and lifted his wrench.

“You know anything about this?” He had switched back to English.

Rafael threw him a sarcastic smile, aware that Eddie knew the likely answer.

“If you tell me what to hand you from the toolbox, I can _probably_ identify it.” 

Chuckling, Eddie waved at him to follow.

“Yeah, I remember when my dad tried to make you help us build that wardrobe.”

“I remember that, too,” Rafael said, with feigned cheerfulness. “My thumb was blue for two weeks.”

“It was stupid of me to let you do it. Saw you in P.E. all through elementary school, after all. I should’ve guessed your aim with a hammer would be as shit as your aim with everything else.”

“Funny,” Rafael said, flatly. “You say things like that and yet you think when I hit you in the head with a ball, that wasn’t on purpose.”

Again, Eddie grinned, leading Rafael into the bathroom. It was meticulously cleaned, but there were a few cracked tiles and a blue bathing mat that was frayed at the edges which revealed it had been a long time since anyone had had money to invest into a general overhaul. Eddie lowered himself down on one knee while Rafael sat on the edge of the bathtub, since the bathroom was so small it didn’t allow for two adults to kneel on the floor together – not that he had a great desire to do so.

Looking at Eddie, Rafael noticed how muscular his arms still were, his stomach flat, his hips narrow. With a job that was mostly wrangling prisoners, Rafael guessed keeping in shape was a good idea, but he also thought that someone who was only a few months younger than him had no right to look that much less middle-aged.

“Your mother seemed a bit upset. Did I interrupt anything?”

“You noticed, did you?” Eddie grimaced. “She’s still angry at me because of what happened with Alex.” The unhappy tone of his voice betrayed that she wasn’t the only one.

“Is she fine with me being here?”

“Yes, of course. I think she hopes you’ll be a good influence. You know, like back in the day.”

Rafael snorted, shifting on the rim of the tub. “Obviously she isn’t talking to my family too much, then.”

“Why?”

“Mami and _abuelita_ aren’t happy with me. They think what Alex did was _un pecadillo_. It’s not nice to cheat on your wife, but it doesn’t mean you’ll be a bad mayor.”

Which was true, Rafael had to admit, even if it was hard for him to see the big picture in this specific case.

“But what about the school girl?” Eddie asked.

“My mother’s words were that if that _were_ true, it would be reprehensible. I hope she’ll come around, but so far she seems to think I fell for politician’s play. _Abuelita_ is... from another generation. I don’t think anything that doesn’t actually involve contact really seems improper to her. The girl wasn’t forced, after all, and _abuelita_ met my grandpa when she was her age. He was a bit older as well.”

Rafael loved the woman with all his heart, but that didn’t mean that the fact that she’d been born before the second world war didn’t sometimes make communication difficult.

“Well, if your mamá wants to swap sons for someone who helped Alex, I’m pretty sure my mom would do it in a heartbeat.”

Eddie’s laugh was a little strained.

“Mr. Rodriguez always did say we would end up disappointments to our parents,” Rafael muttered.

The memory of their first grade elementary school teacher made Eddie’s smile grow a little warmer, as Rafael had hoped it would.

For a moment they fell quiet. Rafael watched Eddie take out a piece of pipe from under the sink. He moved to the side to allow him to clean it at the faucet of the tub.

“What’s going on with your sink?”

“Just a drain leak. I tried tightening the compression nuts and that didn’t do much, but I’m seeing now there’s a few blockages in the p-trap.”

“What trap?”

“This thing,” Eddie said, as he pushed a stained cloth into the bent piece of pipe. “It’s called that because when you mount it on the rest of the pipes, it looks like a P.”

“That is pretty straightforward,” Rafael admitted. He felt his phone buzz and pulled it out, throwing a quick glance at the screen, which informed him of a text from one of his colleagues.

“Who is it?”

“Just the office,” Rafael said, pocketing the phone again.

“You really do work a lot, don’t you?” Eddie asked, rinsing the p-trap.

“It’s that kind of job.”

“Right. Still, you know how you get.”

Rafael raised a brow. “How do I get?”

“You called me from Harvard once because you hadn’t slept in forty hours or something, and you couldn’t remember whether you’d forgotten your mum’s birthday. Which was in a completely different month, by the way.”

Now that Eddie brought it up, Rafael also remembered that sleep-addled call, when he’d just been away from home for a few months and running to Eddie and Alex when something went awry had still been his first instinct (for a while, being without them really had felt like he’d forgotten a limb back in the Bronx). Somehow he’d convinced himself he had missed calling for his mother’s birthday, but completely forgotten the actual date. Eddie had gently told him to go the hell to sleep.

“You can’t compare that. My resistance to caffeine and energy supplements wasn’t nearly as well-developed then.”

“You’re not actually taking any pills, are you?”

“No.”

Eddie frowned at him. He probably knew Rafael was lying.

“Seriously, Rafi. I know you love your job and all, but take it easy. Nothing’s import enough to kill yourself for it.”

Rafael expected to feel annoyance creep up because of Eddie’s advice; he did not take well to commentary on aspects of his life which he was old enough to handle by himself. However, it was difficult to fault Eddie for doing what he had always done – taking care of Rafael. It was just the way he interacted with people.

“If I start forgetting cornerstone memories again, you’ll be the first to know.”

Rafael got up to grab a dirty towel from the basket so Eddie could dry his hands after he was done with his p-trap. His friend knelt back down next to the sink again, silent on the matter. Long ago, Rafael had taught him via demonstration that he would always have the last word in any argument.

“Where’d I put my wrench?”

“Here,” Rafael said, picking it up from behind Eddie’s left foot. “See, I can be helpful during repairs. Just don’t make me come any closer, I don’t want to ruin my suit.”

Eddie laughed at Rafael playing coquettish as he attached the p-trap and cranked the nut on the pipe with the wrench. He repeated the tightening process a few more times, then turned on the main water supply and, while using the faucet, leaned down to check on the pipes. Rafael, too, looked at the result of his efforts. There was no dripping.

“That should last for a few months,” Eddie said and stood up straight to wash his hands.

“Does it break a lot?”

“Most things here do,” Eddie said with a brief smile. “It’s an old house and the landlord doesn’t really give a shit. You know how it is.”

Indeed, Rafael remembered breaking pipes and open electric wires and appliances frankenstein’d together from all sorts of cheap replacement parts. It was not something he had any wish to ever return to.

Eddie wiped his wet hands on the towel Rafael had put out and then gestured at Rafael to follow him.

“Come, we’ll eat.”

When they returned to the kitchen, Maria was already waiting there. She put her TV magazine aside and focused a displeased gaze on Eddie. The flowers Rafael had brought were in a vase on the table now, next to a pot half-filled with _asopao de pollo_. The smell of cooked chicken, rice, garlic and spices reminded Rafael that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

“There you are. Honestly, we’re not being good hosts today. You made Rafael wait this long for his dinner, Eddie.”

“He’s not the skinny kid he used to be, mum,” Eddie said, easily switching back to Spanish to match his mother. He reached out and patted Rafael’s stomach, giving him an impertinent grin. “He can wait a bit for food.”

“It’s not funny,” his mother chided, as they sat down.

“Eddie just wants all of your food to himself,” Rafael said jovially. “I can’t blame him.”

The compliment seemed to calm Maria down a little. She smiled at Rafael.

“It’s nice to have you with us again, Rafael.”

“I know, I haven’t kept in touch much over the last few years,” he said apologetically, as Eddie began shovelling food onto his plate. He hadn’t really for the last decade, to be honest, not to the point that he had still visited Eddie’s mother.

“Oh, it’s fine, I know you’re very busy. That’s the price of being successful.”

Rafael nodded his head and lifted his hand to grab Eddie’s wrist.

“That’s enough. You wouldn’t want me to get even fatter, would you?” he asked, pointedly glancing at his own stomach.

“Don’t be stupid, Rafi,” Eddie just said and heaped another spoonful of rice onto his plate, piling it. “I was joking. This is all fine.”

As he said so, he reached over again, digging his fingers into the soft flesh around Rafael’s middle. Though he didn’t mind Eddie’s hands on him, Rafael did flinch just a little, biting his tongue not to laugh. He wasn’t used to people just touching him like that, not without rather less innocent intent.

“You’re still ticklish,” Eddie said, relenting with just a little triumph in his eyes.

“We’re about thirty years too old for that game,” Rafael answered, in a warning tone.

Eddie just chuckled and raised his beer. Rafael realised there was a bottle of Corona Especiale placed in front of him as well.

“To Rafael,” Eddie said, knocking their bottles together.

“To the hosts,” Rafael replied, and smiled at Maria, who had a glass of juice, and her son in turn.

For a while, he just ate while the other two sipped from their drinks. In his pocket, Rafael’s phone kept buzzing arrhythmically, informing him of the arrival of e-mails and messages.

“Who wants to talk to you that badly?” Eddie asked, finally.

“It’s a case I’m working with Narcotics,” Rafael answered. “Gang crimes, the usual brands of trafficking – it gets complicated.”

“Great, are you gonna send us more gangbangers? I wish we could ship them out to different parts of the country. Putting them in jail together with all their friends is just giving them a new playing field, no matter what we try,” Eddie said.

Rafael nodded his head, somewhat gloomily.

“Well, without overstepping the boundaries of my confidentiality, so far we haven’t gotten anywhere close to making arrests. Some of my esteemed colleagues need more hand-holding than others,” he said, tapping the phone in his pocket.

“Hey, talking of gangs, weren’t you involved with the Farignolli thing?”

“Oh, our local godfather?”

Eddie grinned at the description, nodding his head

“I was one of the prosecutors.”

“Did you ever meet Farignolli in person? It’s no wonder he killed like three people with his bare hands, he’s a-”

“Could we please pick another topic for the dinner table?” Maria demanded, her sharp gaze now meeting both of them.

Rafael had to smile with a mouthful of rice. It had been a while since he had felt this young, and while his childhood was not usually a time he remembered with fondness, looking at Eddie, he realised that he had missed some of it a lot more than the rest.

They continued their conversation about the case involving a resurging New York branch of the Mafia after dinner and Rafael was shocked to find it was already eleven in the evening the next time he glanced at his watch. Eddie brought him to the door and, before he let him go, gave him another crushing hug.


	3. Chapter 3

A week later, Rafael was downing his fifth cup of coffee while working through a particularly boring stack of business reports when his phone rang. He picked it up and was happily surprised to find Eddie’s number on the screen.

“Hey, Rafi.”

Eddie sounded out of breath, slightly hounded. Rafael’s joy quickly dissipated.

“Hello. Everything alright?”

“Sort of. I need you to do me a favour – sorry – yes, I just told you, I’ll be right there! Just let me finish this!” Eddie barked at someone, his voice sounding a little more distant before he moved back to the speaker. “We’re having a situation here and I can’t leave, not for a couple hours if it goes badly. I need someone to get Manny.”

“Didn’t you say he goes home from school on his own?”

Rafael remembered Eddie mentioning that in one of their conversations the last time they’d met.

“Yeah, but they were doing some special tour of the Tribeca Performing Arts Center today. We were supposed to arrange for them to be picked up there after the trip. Mamá’s with her sister in the hospital and-”

“It’s fine, Eddie. The Performing Arts Center, that’s just a few streets from 1 Hogan Place, right?”

He was one-handedly punching the name into Google Maps while he talked.

“I think so, yeah. It’s not far. I’ll get him as soon as I can.”

“Just concentrate on what you’re doing over there, Eddie. I don’t want to bring your son to visit you in the hospital. We’ll be at the office.”

“Thanks, Rafi.” Relief was palpable in Eddie’s voice. “Okay, I really gotta go.”

The line went dead and Rafael had time to think about the fact that he had just agreed to watch a child by himself, a situation he had (luckily) not found himself in in over twenty years.

His computer informed him that he would just have to go down Leonard and Hudson Street, then follow Greenwich Street a few hundred metres and take a turn at Chambers Street. It was a walk, but it probably wouldn’t kill him to stretch his legs anyway. He had already been to lunch today, but considering that, should he have been in the habit of keeping count, he would be at conservatively estimated two thousand hours of overtime or so, it was unlikely anyone would criticise him for taking a break out of turn.

-

Rafael’s breath curled as white wisps in the crisp, cold air before him. The leaves on the trees of the Washington Market Park to his right were shining in red and yellow, looking like still fire in the golden sunlight. If he went here in just a few weeks at the same time of day, all Rafael would probably be able to see would be naked branches against an already darkening sky. Of course, he wouldn’t really have a reason to come here. Spending so much time working had massively narrowed down Rafael’s vision of the city to the few key sites he saw when he climbed out of his usual subway stations or the taxi.

There were quite a few groups of kids waiting around before the front entrance; Rafael guessed Manny’s class hadn’t been the only one to do the tour. It took him a moment to find Manny in the chattering, laughing, wildly shifting crowd. He stood close to the door with another little boy with long, wild hair. Just as Rafael had spotted him, Manny turned and looked straight at him, blankly, and Rafael wondered for a moment whether he would recognise him at all.

Manny was quick to disperse that concern. He came jogging closer, dodging other kids.

“Hello, Rafael,” he said, brightly. “Where’s daddy?”

Rafael found himself briefly wondering about the diction and tone he should go for. The only other children he usually spoke to were victims he met through the SVU and wasn’t that a sad thought? Eventually, he decided not to degenerate to cooing and simplifying too much, since he didn’t think he would manage to be believable as the fun uncle and as a bonus it would also make him feel like a moron. He would just hope Manny could keep up.

“Your dad has something important to do at work,” Rafael said, carefully avoiding the word ‘emergency’. “He asked me to pick you up.”

“Oh, okay.”

Apparently, this wasn’t a completely new turn of events for Manny.

“Your dad wants you to stay with me until he can come get you. Is that alright?”

Whether Manuel liked the idea or not, he really didn’t have much of a choice, considering the lack of alternatives, but Rafael thought it was better to ask, at least.

“Yeah, that’s okay,” Manuel said, looking up at Rafael.

“Right, now – which one is your teacher?”

There were several adults strewn about the children running around in front of the entrance doors.

“There, that’s Ms. Jordan,” Manuel said, pointing at a plump, middle-aged woman whose red hair was currently escaping from her ponytail in all directions. Rafael approached her, Manny following behind.

“Ms. Jordan?” he asked, to get her attention. “I’m Rafael Barba, a friend of Mr. Garcia’s. He asked me to pick up Manuel.”

“Oh, sure, that’s fine,” she said, distractedly, turning around to a girl who was attempting to scale the side of the building with sheer force of velocity, dashing towards the wall and jumping up. “Rihanna, stop it!” she shouted, already striding in her direction.

Counterproductively, Rafael wished that she had put up a bit more of a fight against some perfect stranger walking up to take one of the kids off her hands. He tried to tell himself that she would probably expect Manuel to alert her if Rafael was lying, but the reality was more likely that she was mandated to wrangle more kids at once than any reasonable human being should attempt to and that she had simply given up on doing it by the book.

“Rihanna’s always doing nonsense,” Manuel said. “She doesn’t listen.”

“Well, I hope you’re completely different,” Rafael said, meaning it. It would make things easier for him.

With Manuel by his side, Rafael began the way back down the path towards Chambers Street.

“I haven’t had any detention this year at all,” Manuel said with a proud grin that was missing a tooth on the bottom.

“What about last year?” Rafael asked.

“Last year doesn’t count. It’s not on this year’s report card,” Manuel argued.

That made Rafael smile. Pretty strategic thinking for a seven-year-old.

“I guess you’re right,” he allowed. A cold gust of wind made him shiver as they stepped onto the sidewalk.

“Don’t you want to close your jacket?” he asked, eyeing the somewhat flimsy pullover Manuel was wearing.

“No.”

Stupid question, Rafael told himself – it would probably be closed if he did.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to close it anyway. Your dad won’t be happy if I hand you back with pneumonia.”

“What’s pne… what’s that?” Manuel asked.

“An illness you get from not closing your jacket,” Rafael said, slipping back into sarcasm. He knew kids didn’t get that, but it was difficult for him to catch himself at every turn.

Manuel frowned. “There’s no illness like that.”

“Maybe not _just_ from not closing your jacket, but it doesn’t help. Pneumonia is like – a cold, but much worse,” Rafael said.

“Gustavo says he never ever gets cold. Not even in a t-shirt in winter,” Manuel said.

This at least explained why, despite the fact that Rafael thought he clearly saw his teeth chattering a little, Manuel still seemed opposed to the idea of closing his jacket. He imagined Gustavo was somewhat of an ideal.

“That’s very bad for Gustavo. He should feel cold when it is cold. If he runs around in cold weather and doesn’t even notice, eventually, his fingers will freeze blue and fall off.”

Manuel laughed. “No way!”

“No, I’m serious,” Rafael said, innocently. He was leading them down the street past the park again, fallen leaves crunching under their feet. “If Gustavo really ‘never ever’ gets cold, that would worry me. I doubt he’s telling the truth, though.”

Had he known the child a little better, Rafael would have leaned down to close his jacket himself, but he didn’t feel like taking liberties like that with a stranger – even if it was a very tiny stranger. Thankfully, Manuel smiled again at Rafael’s comment.

“I do, too,” he said, like it was a secret, and grabbed the zipper of his jacket. “But everyone says Gustavo is that strong.”

“Just because a lot of people say something is true doesn’t necessarily mean it is,” Rafael said, with a shrug. “Would you like to eat something?”

It was five in the afternoon, too early for dinner and too late for lunch, but Rafael figured the kid would be hungry after trudging along the Performing Arts Center all day. Besides, the list of activities suited for children in his head was woefully short and feeding them happened to be on the top.

Manuel nodded his head and mentally, Rafael went over the restraurants he’d noticed on his way here.

“There’s a McDonalds over there,” Manuel said hopefully, as they turned the corner to Greenwich Street.

“No, actual food,” Rafael said, raising a brow. “What do you like?”

“Fries,” Manuel answered, unsurprisingly. “And chocolate. And burritos with beef. And ice cream.”

“All together?” Rafael asked.

Manuel stared and, as Rafael managed to keep a straight face, laughed.

“No, of course not!”

Rafael just shrugged his shoulders, like that was a mistake anyone could have made.

“I know a diner, they have all sorts of things. I’m sure you’ll find something there.”

While they walked, Manuel was talking animatedly about his time in the Center. It apparently had been spent doing some improv work with performing arts students and learning a little bit about the history of theatre, which Manuel was now happy to share with Rafael. He was rather likeable as kids went, Rafael thought, although he didn’t remind him much of Eddie, who had never been a big talker, nor quite so continuously smiley.

The _Square Diner_ was a squat little building cowering in the shadows of bigger houses at the corner of Leonard and Varick Street, the kind of place which did foods from half a dozen nations at an acceptable quality while not particularly excelling at anything. Rafael had eaten there with colleagues a few times and thought that a place that also sold burgers was a safe bet with a child; and at least the the meal would still have some semblance of nutritional value, unlike its chain restaurant fast food equivalent.

They squeezed into a booth by the window and a waitress came to get their drinks order as she handed them the laminated menues. Rafael opted for a coffee and Manuel wanted the fresh lemonade.

“The food is expensive,” Manuel said, as he leafed through the menu.

Rafael wasn’t surprised he had glanced at the prices because even at seven, so had Rafael. If you hadn’t grown up with much, you quickly learned that it was important. Actually, for Tribeca, the food was pretty cheap, but not compared to the take-out places Manuel probably visited back home.

“It’s fine,” Rafael said. “Just choose whatever you want.”

Rafael ordered an avocado burger with a salad on the side, while Manuel went for a grilled chicken quesadilla.

“If you eat half my salad we’ll order dessert. Deal?” Rafael asked, opening the menu on the page in question, so Manuel could have a look at the tempting list of cakes, pies and jello. Since he didn’t know how much Eddie insisted on vegetables, diplomacy seemed a more promising avenue to him than blackmail in the vein of ‘I’ll tell your father if you don’t’.

As expected, the boy nodded his head vigorously.

After they had ordered, Manuel stared out onto the street for a moment, watching the barely contained chaos of inner city traffic. Because Rafael didn’t really know what topics would interest him at all, he remained in slightly awkward silence.

“What’s your job, Rafael?” Manuel asked, suddenly.

“I’m an A.D.A. .” Rafael had to pause to rearrange his daily activities into the most child-friendly version that still explained what he did. “That means Assistant District Attorney. When the police catch a criminal, they come to me with their evidence. If I think the criminal is guilty, I go to court and try to convince the judge and the jury of it, too. Supposing I’ve done my job well, they’ll then sentence the criminal.”

“Are you really good at your job?”

Rafael smiled lopsidedly. “I try my best.”

“Do your criminals go to daddy’s prison?”

“Yes, some of them,” Rafael said, nodding his head. “You could say we work together, in a way.”

The waitress returned with their food and Manuel was kept busy digging into his quesadilla. Pointedly, Rafael speared a piece of tomato and put it down on the boy’s plate. Manuel grinned sheepishly.

Before he could try his hand at a pedagogical speech about healthy eating, Rafael’s phone buzzed in the pocket of his suit jacket. He took it out and saw Benson’s name on the screen.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Barba, are you around? Carmen couldn’t tell us where you’d vanished to.”

“It’s half past five, maybe I’m off work.”

The fact that Liv just snorted softly in response did not surprise Rafael.

“I’m taking a break. What is it?”

“We have Dorston here and his lawyer says he won’t talk to us unless we bring the A.D.A. in, too, in case they want to make a deal.”

“Brilliant.”

Rafael glanced at Manuel, who was listening with interest to the one half of the conversation he could hear, and quickly started shovelling green leaves into his mouth when he saw Rafael had caught him eavesdropping.

It was the first time in weeks Dorston, a witness-slash-possible-perp in a long-going case involving the prostitution of several underage girls, was ready to talk at all, so it would be a shame to let the chance slip away.

“Give me a second,” Rafael said, lowering the phone and leaning the speaker against his thigh. “Hey, Manuel,” he began, “would you like to see a police station from inside?”

-

Since Manuel had held up his end of the deal, Rafael waited until the waitress had served them a brownie to go before he packed himself and the boy into the back of a taxi. Thankfully, Manuel was still young enough to find a ride through the middle of Manhattan very exciting and he was constantly glued to the window while his fingers turned sticky from holding his brownie until the chocolate pieces melted. Rafael gave him a tissue before they walked into the 16th precinct police station.

Benson regarded him and his hanger-on with thinly veiled surprise.

“Well, hello there – who is this, Rafael?”

“Do you remember Eduardo Garcia?”

“Of course.”

“That’s his son, Manuel.”

Manuel, craning his neck to see every bit of the office he could, turned his attention to Liv and gave her a timid smile.

“Eddie works at Rikers and apparently they ran into some trouble there. He asked me to pick Manuel up from a school trip,” Rafael explained, his voice lowered.

Liv nodded her head. “Yes, we heard about Rikers. One of our officers was supposed to go there for an interrogation, but Rikers went into lockdown.”

“Lockdown?”

Rafael’s stomach did a little flip. It hadn’t sounded that bad when he’d talked to Eddie. Apparently, the shock must have shown on his face, for Liv looked a little worried.

“It’ll be fine,” she was quick to assure him. “They are probably just following procedure.” Her eyes strayed towards Manuel, who had drifted a few steps away to watch two officers ushering a loudly protesting man towards the interrogation rooms. “I didn’t know you and this Eddie were still that close.”

“We weren’t before.”

It felt too personal to go into the facts of how they were slowly moving towards rekindling their relationship. Rafael didn’t want to expose something so fragile and new to public scrutiny yet, not even if it was from a friend.

“Anyway, could someone keep an eye on him while I have my chat with Dorston?”

“Of course. Detective Amaro?”

Amaro looked up from his desk, spotting for the first time Rafael with the little boy. His eyebrows rose.

“This little visitor is a friend of Barba’s. Could you show him around while Barba talks to Dorston?”

“Sure. Hey there, buddy,” Amaro said, smiling at Manuel as he pushed his chair back.

Though Rafael had his doubts about Amaro in some situations, the fact that he was a father, and apparently not the worst, made him a good fit for this task, in all probability better than Rafael. However, Manuel turned to Rafael again.

“Will you be right back, Rafael?”

“Of course,” he said, slightly surprised. True, there were a lot of new faces at once for a kid here and Manuel was probably feeling overwhelmed. Rafael just hadn’t been expected not to be counted among them.

-

“I’m sorry that took so long.”

It was already dark when they were on the way back to Rafael’s office. There were no calls from Eddie on his phone, so he assumed that Rikers was still in lockdown and didn’t allow himself to entertain the idea that something worse than that had happened to him.

“It’s okay.” Manual grinned. “Detective Amaro showed me his desk and Detective Rollins let me try out her handcuffs on him!”

The way Manuel was hanging in the corner between seat and window, Rafael could guess that they were approaching his bedtime. He wondered briefly if he should just take him home, where he had an actual bed to offer him, but he didn’t know how much longer the lockdown would last and he really did need to go back to work to finalise the deal he had just cut.

Manuel was keeping close by Rafael’s side as they walked through the empty hallways of 1 Hogan Place towards his office, their steps loud in the silence. Carmen’s desk was already empty as Rafael unlocked the door to his office and allowed Manuel in.

“This is all yours?”

“Yes, that’s my office.”

For a moment, Manuel stood there, contemplating the room.

“It’s really big! Angelo’s mom works in an office, but he says it’s so tiny, like a shoe box.”

“It depends on what job you work,” Rafael said, pointing at the sofa. “Would you like to sit down?”

Manuel took off his jacket and threw it over the armrest before he took a seat.

“What did you do at the police station, Rafael?” he asked, as Rafael set down his briefcase.

“I went with the Lieutenant to talk to a man and his lawyer. That’s the person who helps him in court.”

“I know that,” Manuel said, nodding his head.

“He’s going to tell us more about the other people who did something bad, but he wants us to go easy on him in exchange. Make sure he doesn’t get punished as much.”

Perhaps he should have told Manuel that it was grown-up stuff, but he still remembered how he himself had hated to hear that as a child. And, after all, while the details were seriously inappropriate for a child as well as very complicated, the principle of cutting a deal wasn’t rocket science.

“If he also did the same bad things, that’s not fair, is it?”

“No. Sometimes you have to compromise, though.”

“What’s that?”

Rafael grabbed a bottle of water and an empty glass, which stood on a tray on top of a shelf, waiting for visitors. While he filled it, he tapped into his inner dictionary.

“It means to get a result so that everyone involved in a fight lets go of some of the things they want in exchange for getting some others. It’s not perfect, but here, it might allow us to find many other people who did bad things.”

Manuel took the glass and sipped. As he sat there, Rafael saw lines appearing in his forehead. His gaze flicked towards Rafael, unsure. Obviously he was debating something.

“My dad did something bad, too,” he said, suddenly, carefully. “I heard it on the news.”

Rafael hadn’t previously thought that he could be any angrier with Alex for involving Eddie in the media mud-slinging than he already was, but looking at Manual sitting there with his shoulders drawn up almost to his ears and a grief-stricken look on his face, he found he had been wrong.

“That’s true,” he said, slowly.

“Are you going to put him in jail, too?”

After hesitating briefly, Rafael sat down next to him on the couch.

“No, your dad is not going to jail, Manuel.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” Rafael said. “And,” he glanced to the side, at Manuel looking at his own feet, “don’t be too hard on him. He thought he was doing it for a good cause.” Helping a friend, one who might change New York for the better, one who might help you turn your own fate around and take care of your family – Rafael thought those were good reasons, even if he didn’t agree with what Eddie had done. “That’s not an excuse, but he’s not like the people that I bring to trial. He’s not a bad guy, he just made a stupid decision.”

“But the guy on the TV said he was doing it for money.”

“He was lying, that much I know for sure.”

Manuel considered him for a moment, then nodded his head. It seemed like he believed him.

“Don’t tell dad that I heard, okay? And not _abuela_ , either. They’ll be sad.”

“I’m sure your dad would be fine talking to you about it.”

“But I don’t want him to be sad. He’s already sad a lot, and he and _abuela_ fight all the time now.”

Rafael didn’t know how to respond to that. He felt his chest tighten for Eddie and for the little boy next to him trying to protect his family. He hadn’t thought that he had much of Eddie in him; he saw now that he had judged too soon.

The boy still looked thoughtful while Rafael sat there tongue-tied, but he had also begun rubbing at his eyes.

“You should try to get some sleep, Manuel,” Rafael said. “It’s getting late.”

Manuel nodded his head.

“I think the couch should be fine. Just take off your shoes.”

Looking around, Rafael spotted his own coat hanging from the rack in the corner. While Manuel did as he was told, he took it down. Then he folded Manuel’s own jacket into the vague shape of a pillow and handed him his long black coat.

“Sorry, I don’t have an actual blanket here.”

“It’s fine,” Manuel said. Indeed, the coat did cover him shoulders to toes without the kid having to fold himself in half under it. One foot in a Lion King sock with a few holes was poking out under the make-shift blanket, dangling off the couch.

Rafael shut off the main light so his open laptop was the only thing illuminating the room when he revived it from sleep mode. He saw that Manuel was watching him from his spot on the couch in the dim twilight while he sat down at the desk and tried to convince himself he was in any mindset to work.

The clock ticked on and Manuel’s eyes eventually fell shut. Rafael tried to take this as a good sign. Maybe it was normal that Eddie took so long when he was held up at work, otherwise his son would have been more worried. He pulled out his phone to write a message:

_Manuel and me will be at the office until ten. If you can’t make it until then, I’ll take him home._

Attached to that text was his address. He knew he’d shown Eddie the apartment once, some six years ago, but he didn’t expect him to still know where it was.

It was a quarter past nine when Rafael heard hasty steps in the hall and then a quick knock at his door. Outside was Eddie, breathing hard, face red. There was a taped wound across his right cheekbone – probably a souvenir from the lockdown.

A weight much heavier than he’d realised fell off his shoulders as he stood in the open door looking at him. He was used to being around people who put their life in direct danger just about every day. He had walked into a police station asking for an officer and been told they had died on duty twice in his career. He had spent a lot of time waiting for detectives he had worked with for months to come back from high risk undercover operations and hostage situations. It was just not something one got used to, though, and Rafael particularly disliked the feeling of knowing there was nothing he could do to help.

“You look like you got in a fight,” Rafael said, quietly. “Did you win?”

“You bet.” Eddie grinned, though there was a hint of worry and a lot of exhaustion mixed in; it was no longer the proud victor’s smile he’d shown Rafael back on the playground after his brawls. “Sorry I’m late.”

“You’re in luck: You’re in fact _so_ late I’d started to wonder whether you’d show up at all, so now I’m just relieved to see you.”

Stepping back, Rafael gestured towards Manuel, still stretched out on the couch and wrapped up in Rafael’s coat, the collar drawn up to his nose.

“He’s been asleep like this for a while,” he said quietly.

Eddie didn’t answer. Silently, he stared at his son on the couch.

“I thought since it’s a school night… he was tired, too.”

“No, that’s perfect,” Eddie said, quickly shaking his head. On quiet feet, he made his way over to kneel down by his son’s side and give him a gentle nudge.

“ _Mi hijo_?”

Manuel pulled the coat a little higher, but since Eddie didn’t stop nudging him, he was eventually forced to open his eyes. They brightened at the sight of Eddie.

“Hi, papi,” Manuel mumbled, disentangling his hand from the sleeve of Rafael’s coat to wrap it around Eddie’s neck. Eddie used that anchor to pull him up into a sitting position, where Manuel slumped against him.

“Time to go home, okay? Put on your shoes.”

Eddie handed them to Manuel. It was good thing they were Velcro, Rafael considered; he doubted Manny could’ve navigated shoe laces with his eyes half-shut like they were. He wanted to ask Eddie about the lockdown, but not in front of Manuel. Maybe he would call him tomorrow.

Eddie manoeuvred Manuel into his jacket and picked him up, although Manuel was already a little bit too lanky to look quite like he fit in someone’s arms. He draped himself comfortably over his father’s shoulder.

“Sorry I couldn’t come get you from the trip. Did you have fun with Rafael?” Eddie asked.

“We had lunch and then we went to a police station,” Manuel said, excitement breaking through the grogginess for a moment. “It was really great!”

“I’m sorry,” Rafael said, a little sheepishly. “Something important came up. A detective took care of him while we were there.”

“No problem, sounds like Manuel liked it. ‘sides, I asked you on way too short notice.” Eddie smiled at Rafael. “I’m here by car. You need a lift?”

“No, thanks, I’ll probably still be here for a while.”

Besides, it would be quite the detour Eddie would have had to take to drive him home, and he looked like he could need some rest himself. There were probably more bruises hidden under his clothes.

“You work really late, Rafael,” Manuel muttered against his father’s shoulder.

Eddie chuckled. “Yeah, he’s right, Rafi. _Way_ too late. Gonna have a heart attack at 45 if you carry on like this.”

“Thanks, mom and dad,” Rafael answered, rolling his eyes. “Get home safe.”

When Eddie carried him out the door, Manuel raised his head a little and waved goodbye at Rafael. Belatedly, Rafael lifted his hand to give an awkwardly stilted wave back.

Considering his inexperience in childcare, Rafael decided that this could have gone worse.


	4. Chapter 4

“It’s great we finally managed to meet up like this.”

Eddie took a swig of his beer. They were sitting in a small bar near Burnside Avenue, where Rafael was getting a few odd looks for the Italian three-piece suit he’d worn to court today and hadn’t had an opportunity to change out of. The Tecate beer was the same that he’d drunken when he was 16 years old. Rafael nipped at it. He usually preferred wine or whiskey, but the atmosphere – the dim light from the TV over the bar, the smell of cheap cigars and alcohol that could burn a hole in the floor – had him feeling a little less formal than usual. His suit jacket was hanging over the back of the chair and he had folded up his sleeves so the dust and molten cheese from the nachos wouldn’t get on them as he picked them from the plate they shared.

“I don’t know, I liked watching you work in your bathroom while I didn’t have to do anything,” Rafael said with a smart little smile.

Eddie grinned.

“You should visit us at home again sometime. Manny’s been asking after you.”

“Really?”

Rafael raised his brows. It had been a week since their afternoon together and while he had come out thinking of Manuel as one of the few children he might actively like at some point, given time and familiarity, he couldn’t have said what impression he had left on the boy.

“Yeah, he’s a fan. He said all the police officers listened to you.”

Rafael snorted.

“In my dreams, maybe,” he said, bemused. “He’s a good kid, your son,” he added, gesturing at Eddie with his bottle. “He didn’t complain at all about being dragged through half of Manhattan.”

Though it was praise for his child, he saw Eddie himself lighting up a bit, as most parents would.

“Yeah, he’s great,” Eddie said, fondly. After taking another swig of his beer, he leaned forward.

“So tell me a little, Rafi. I don’t know how your life’s going right now. You got a girlfriend? Er – or a boyfriend?”

For traditionally Catholic Eddie, the matter of Rafael’s bisexuality, which he had not hidden from his friends by the time he had his first real relationship with a man in college, had always been an obviously contentious topic. He’d never told Rafael that what he was doing was sinful, unnatural, or wrong, but Rafael had known his father and was sure that before he ditched his family a few months after Eddie’s thirteenth’s birthday, he had planted a lot of those thoughts in his head. Plus, they used to have the same priest, and Rafael remembered his stance on the matter as well.

So mostly, Eddie had profited from the fact that Rafael didn’t like discussing his romantic relationships much and avoided the awkwardness of facing that reality; and for the last five to ten years, they’d really grown apart too much to get that personal. Rafael commended him silently for at least trying to make it clear Rafael didn’t have to hide from him.

“Neither,” Rafael said. “I wouldn’t know where to fit them into my life right now, to be honest. The SVU is keeping me pretty busy.”

“Married to the job, huh?”

Rafael nodded his head. He had gotten used to the thought that it might stay this way.

“What about you?”

“Eh – not really been in the mood after my marriage, to be honest. I tried dating a couple of times, but, I don’t know… I guess I rather wanna focus on Manny right now, anyway,” Eddie said, glancing aside.

As despondent as Eddie sounded, Rafael guessed that the way his marriage had ended had left Eddie with deep furrows in his psyche – not that Eddie would put it like that. He had always been the type to shrug the emotional blows off, or pretend that he did; that was how _real_ men did it, after all.

“Besides, I still have my job. That takes up a lot of time, too, if I work extra shifts and I kind of got to, you know, with mamà’s medical bills from the hip surgery.”

“Of course. I hope those extra shifts don’t usually come in the form of lockdowns, though.”

Surprised, Eddie looked at him, a nacho half on the way to his mouth.

“How’d you know we were in lockdown?”

“I didn’t, but the SVU did. Although considering how long it took for you to come get Manuel, I probably could have guessed.”

Popping the nacho into mouth, Eddie nodded his head.

“When I called you, we weren’t sure if we could keep a lid on it without going all out. It’s been nothing but trouble since we locked up all those mob guys. Not just them, just – they tipped some balance, I think.”

Rafael imagined that these additions were like bringing a new species into a closed ecosystem. Even if it was not alone able to destroy it, it would inevitably change the world around it a little bit while adapting.

“I hope that scratch on your face is the worst you took from this particular fight?”

“Just a few bruises,” Eddie was quick to assure him. “No reason for you to run off and get the band-aids.”

“You laugh, but my early ambitions as a medic probably saved you a few scars,” Rafael claimed, with a smirk. His _abuelita_ had worked as a nurse in a hospital during the second world war and had made sure to teach Rafael the basics of first aid, which he had been able to put to good use, considering how many fights _los tres mosqueteros de Jerome Avenue_ ended up in.

“Yeah, you did for all of us,” Eddie said, smiling .

A memory resurfaced in Rafael’s mind, one of many of its kind. He remembered them sitting in his room, Eddie, Rafael and Alex, Rafael digging through a shoe carton filled with pills and cheap salves and bandages while Eddie was holding his bleeding hand and Alex, his lips crusted with his own dried blood, was dabbing at the wound with a tissue, telling Eddie they’d make sure he was okay. Eddie, who’d been crying before, mutely nodded his head at the words. He’d believed him; Alex had always been someone who could make people think his way.

Rafael emptied his beer.

-

“Hey, you paid for drinks the other day. ‘course I’m gonna come help out.”

“I assure you, having you in my debt was not my secret intention when I did that,” Rafael said, raising a brow at him.

Eddie looked attractive in a wild way in just a black shirt and jeans, an old, scuffed, brown leather jacket thrown over to protect him against the biting wind that had been blowing all day. He was certainly dressed better for the occasion of helping Rafael’s _abuelita_ with moving the living room furniture than Rafael, who had headed to her straight from work. He was pulled against Eddie’s chest in a brief welcome hug.

“I know. Come on.”

Rafael had expected a smile, at least a twinkle in Eddie’s brown eyes, but he seemed distracted with something as he hurried up the narrow staircase before him.

Rafael’s grandmother opened the door for them. She looked more frail with every year now and seeing her always came with a twinge of worry for Rafael. Still, at least her mind had not fallen in with her body in slow deterioration and she smiled as she waited for Rafael to lean down and kiss her cheek.

“There you are, Rafi. I didn’t think you’d have time!”

Rafael would’ve liked to say ‘always, _abuelita_ /’, but he knew for a fact that he had not consistently been quite the grandson he should have been. It had always been too easy for him to let his job pull him away from the people he loved.

“I thought I better bring some back-up with stronger arms than me,” he joked, instead, stepping out of the way.

“Eddie, good to see you! How is your mother? Is her hip any better?”

“Getting better little by little,” Eddie said, with a brief smile, carefully hugging the old woman.

“I heard from Manuel’s math teacher he’s been doing good on the last tests.”

“She lives down the street, doesn’t she? Yeah, I think he’s finally gotten the hang of multiplying now.”

Rafael had always wanted to escape the Bronx and he had never regretted that he had managed it. However, as Eddie and his _abuelita_ went on chatting about neighbours while she led them into the living room, it was hard not to be aware of what he’d given up on. There was a tight-knit familiarity with people and surroundings that was harder to achieve in an anonymous Upper West Side apartment building. It wouldn’t surprise him if Eddie knew more of some of the day-to-day life of his family than he did, and it wasn’t like he never called them; but he didn’t live here anymore, didn’t shop at the same _bodega_ , didn’t go to the same churches, and had missed out on the last decades of gossip.

“What exactly do you want us to help you with, _abuelita_?” he asked, after waiting for a break in their conversation.

His grandmother let her gaze sweep through the cosy little living room. It was hard to imagine moving anything here due to how cramped it was with knick-knacks and potted plants, Rafael thought.

“I would like for the couch to be under the window,” she said. “The couch table has to stand before it – and the shelf with the TV should be on the other wall here,” she pointed, “so I can still see it properly. Oh, and the closet with the bedsheets will have to be moved, of course, to make room. It can just go in the corner.”

“No problem, Mrs. Diaz,” Eddie said, nodding his head.

“I’ll go make you some coffee. I know Rafi definitely wants some,” she said, throwing her grandson a fond look.

“You know me too well, _abuelita_ ,” Rafael said as he stripped his suit jacket and pulled off his tie so it wouldn’t get in the way of his hands, draping both over the back of an armchair.

“Anything else for you, Eddie?”

“Coffee’s fine.”

While his grandmother went into the kitchen, Eddie quickly surveyed the room.

“Let’s start by moving the closet. We can keep it to the left to make space first.”

Rafael grabbed the edge of the old oak-wood piece of furniture and remembered with a flash why he had hired a company to take care of all his moves in the last fifteen years or so. Eddie, on the other side, probably lifted the lion’s share of the weight, especially when Rafael’s grip slipped from the corner. Rafael expected a comment or a tease, but nothing came.

“Considering my ineptitude, you are suspiciously quiet”, Rafael said, after another moment of rearranging the closet and revealing the depressions it had left in the thick red carpet.

Eddie looked up at him. Rafael could almost see the wheels behind his forehead turning. Then, with a sigh, Eddie set the closet down and leaned against it. The opportunity to take some strain off his arms was welcome, so Rafael did the same.

“When I went to get Manny from school yesterday, a few kids were teasing him.”

“About what?”

“Me. What I did for Alex.”

Eddie huffed a breath, pressed his hands into his sides, fingers digging deep into his hips.

“Sorry to hear that,” Rafael said.

“I’d just hoped – you know, that he wouldn’t find out yet. That I could tell him when he was older.”

For a moment, Rafael hesitated, but what Manuel had feared had already happened – Eddie was definitely sad –, so he supposed it was fair enough to tell his father now.

“Manuel already knew, Eddie,” he said, carefully.

Eddie’s gaze, which had been somewhere on the floor, snapped up.

“What?”

“He told me when we were in my office together. We got to talking about what I was doing at the police station and he was worried whether you’d have to go to jail.”

Running a hand over his face, Eddie stepped away from the closet, didn’t seem to know where to go and just ended up walking a tight circle around the couch with its sand-coloured cover adorned with faded pink roses. He seemed speechless.

“He asked me not to tell you,” Rafael said. Perhaps he shouldn’t have honoured that promise, considering how young Manuel was, but he hadn’t felt it was right to tell Eddie something Manuel had told him in confidence, not if it wasn’t directly threatening to Manuel, at least. A child was still a person, after all, and not all rules applied differently.

“Why would he go to you and not to me?” Eddie said, hands slapping down on the back of the sofa. “I’m his father!”

“Yes, that _is_ probably the reason,” Rafael said calmly.

“What do you mean?”

“Eddie, he doesn’t care about me like he cares about you. That’s what made it easier. He knew I wouldn’t be hurt. I think I was just someone to him who obviously knew about the law and who could help him understand what was going on. He thought you’d be hurt if you knew – and apparently he knows you quite well,” Rafael added.

Eddie looked at him in silence for a moment.

“What did you tell him?”

“I said you’re not going to jail.”

“Thanks to you,” Eddie interjected.

“And I said that you aren’t a bad person, like the people I focus on, you just did something stupid. Although I don’t think he’s angry at you – he seemed more worried to me.”

The tight lines in Eddie’s face evened out a little, though the furrows between his brows remained.

“I didn’t realise Manny was the one who’d pay for me being an idiot. I didn’t…”

“Look, Eddie, it’s done now,” Rafael said, stepping closer and placing a hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “Manuel is not going to hate you for this and the other kids will move on to some new target in a few weeks.”

Though he didn’t look like he believed him, Eddie slowly nodded his head.

“If he didn’t want to talk to me, I’m glad he talked to _you_ , at least. You were always good at that,” he said.

“If you’d rather be at home talking to your son right now, I’m sure I can manage this on my own.”

“You? You’d break your back, Rafi.” Eddie forced a smile, straightened himself and walked back to the closet. “‘sides, there’s gotta be something left I can actually do right.”

-

The next day, Rafael called Eddie on his landline and got Manuel.

“How are you, Rafael?” Manuel asked. He sounded like he had his mouth full with something.

“Fine, thank you. What about you? Eating breakfast?”

“Huh? Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Just a guess,” Rafael said, smiling briefly. “Is your dad around?”

“Uh-huh.”

The receiver was apparently dropped on a soft surface with a quiet thud.

“Daddy, it’s Rafael!” Manuel called.

While he was leafing through the world politics section of the newspaper, Rafael waited. Footsteps came closer and the phone was picked up again.

“What’s up, Rafi?”

“Nothing special, other than my cripplingly sore muscles.”

He heard Eddie chuckling briefly at the other end of the line.

“I had an idea,” Rafael continued. “It’s on short notice, but I just saw an ad.”

That was not true; Rafael had been looking for something that might cheer Eddie and Manuel up, just because the combined memory or the two, each in their own way separately miserable, had refused to leave the back of his mind.

“The Tribeca Performing Arts Center is doing a production of _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_ this afternoon and they’ve still got tickets. You know, the Lewis book, Narnia. Manuel said after the trip that he’d like to go to the theatre. Do you think that’s something he’d be interested in?”

“He liked the Narnia movies…”

“I’d invite the two of you.” He heard Eddie try to start protesting at the other end and cut right through it. “I know for a fact I missed seven of his birthdays, so it’s fair.”

“Thanks,” Eddie said, sounding a little subdued as well as grateful. Rafael imagined with all the costs he had, something like theatre wasn’t often in the cards for them. “Hey, but you should ask him yourself.”

The receiver was handed over.

“What’s with Narnia?” Manuel asked. Obviously he’d been listening in.

“There’s a play about Narnia in the Tribeca Performing Arts Center today. I was wondering if you’d like to go.”

“Really?! Dad, can we?”

In the background, Rafael heard Eddie chuckling and agreeing.

“Are you coming, Rafael?” Manuel asked.

This gave Rafael a little pause. He’d actually planned to send the two of them off alone, hadn’t really considered Manuel might want to include him, too.

“Well – if you want me to…”

“Yes! You need to come!”

It was hard to argue with that much excitement.

“Okay, I’ll come,” he relented. Though the idea of spending an afternoon watching a kid’s play was certainly new, he couldn’t find himself regretting the loss of free time. He enjoyed Eddie’s presence no less than he had when he was a child and Manuel was old enough to hold his end of a conversation, which made him approachable for Rafael, much more so than babies and toddlers were. Besides, clearing his head of his job for a few hours would probably be good for his psyche. “Tell your dad we should make it in time if you pick me up at four.”

-

Though Rafael was not quite the intended age group, he had to say he enjoyed the play. It happened on a rather large stage which the actors made good use of, constantly moving this way and that and engaging the attention of the children with their boisterous style and dazzling costumes. Manuel was literally on the edge of his seat as he perched between Rafael and Eddie, with an attentively wide gaze focused on the stage, his mouth slightly opened through most of the show. To Rafael’s amusement, Eddie was watching with similarly rapt attention.

When it was over, Manuel immediately exploded into a stream of words, retelling to Eddie and Rafael the play they had just all seen together as they pushed their way out of the narrow rows of seats. Rafael let it wash over him, glancing at Eddie. He knew that trouble was anything but over with, but the fact that Eddie and Manuel were both smiling right now made him feel successful.

Manuel was still talking was they walked out onto the street and only stopped when he spotted a sign in the window of a corner store.

“Daddy, can I have some ice cream? I’m hungry,” he said.

“You know _abuela_ is cooking dinner for us.”

“I’ll eat dinner, too,” Manuel said, digging his heels in and pulling at his father’s hand to keep him from bypassing the store.

When an indulgent smile tugged at Eddie’s lips, Rafael knew he was about to give in.

“Alright, just this once. But this is instead of desert,” he said, in what Rafael suspected was a last attempt at bringing some pedagogical thought to the matter. “Rafi, you’re gonna join us?”

“Isn’t it a little cold for ice cream?” Rafael asked, though he was already stepping up next to Eddie to cross the street with them.

“No, it’s not,” Manuel answered, like the very thought that there was an inopportune time for ice cream was shocking to him. Considering he was seven years old, it probably was.

The store, which had a couple of tables and chairs crammed in a corner by the window front, was small and cosy and generously heated, so that the idea of ice cream didn’t seem quite as unfitting anymore. Digging through the store freezer, Manuel unearthed a popsicle wrapped in plastic which sported a cartoon image of a very happy-looking yellow sponge in trousers. Eddie grabbed a Klondike Choco Taco and Rafael decided for a Magnum almond bar, which Eddie immediately snatched from him.

“I said you were invited for today,” Rafael pointed out.

“To the theatre. You don’t always have to pay everything when you’re with me,” Eddie decided.

“I’ve paid _twice_ ,” Rafael said, raising a brow. “I don’t think that constitutes ‘everything’.”

“Well, you’re not paying now.”

Since it seemed to be a matter of pride, Rafael allowed Eddie to take his ice cream and march towards the counter, where a tiny, ancient woman was sitting hunched over her magazine.

“Let’s go find a seat,” Rafael told Manuel.

When they had all squeezed into the uncomfortable plastic garden chairs, Rafael noticed that Manuel was looking at him while he was cracking the chocolate hull of his Magnum with his teeth.

“Daddy says you used to always eat freeze pops as kids,” he said. “Don’t you like them anymore?”

“I haven’t had one in a long time,” Rafael said.

“Why not?”

It was a good question. The last time Rafael remembered having freeze pops was in the privacy of a tiny shoe box apartment without air conditioning which he’d rented right out of university after moving back to New York. The summer would have been unbearable without them.

“Adults don’t really eat freeze pops,” he said, lamely.

“Daddy does.”

Eddie grinned, licking chocolate ice cream off his bottom lip.

“Yeah, but Rafi is way too elegant for that sort of thing now.”

“I don’t get it,” Manuel said. “Why would you stop eating something you like, Rafael?”

Because wearing a suit didn’t go well with eating coloured water in plastic packages, especially not in public. Eddie wasn’t completely off – there were certain things he had just stopped doing to keep up an image. However, he didn’t think Manuel really needed to be introduced to these somewhat vexing aspects of life in society just now.

“I like this, too,” Rafael said, instead, holding up his almond bar. “How did you start talking about freeze pops, anyway?”

“Daddy was telling me about some of the things you did when you were kids.”

“Are you going to let our old sins haunt us forever, Eddie?” Rafael asked, raising his brows.

Eddie just chuckled. “Don’t worry, I left out our worse crimes.”

Manuel looked between them with a smile.

“You’ve been friends forever, it’s great! You’ve known each other for as long as I know Candy and Angelo, and you two are _really_ old now!”

Rafael had to laugh and Eddie reached over to ruffle Manuel’s hair and give him a gentle shove.

“Well, you know what they say, Eddie: out of the mouth of babes.”

Rafael licked at the vanilla ice he’d freed when dismantling the Magnum.

“What baby? I’m not a baby,” Manuel protested, swatting at his father’s hand. With a playfully predatory grin, Eddie went in to poke his fingers between Manuel’s ribs, making him giggle. Rafael watched the wooden stick holding the yellow blob of Manuel’s ice cream wobble precariously between his fingers.

“You two, stop before someone has to eat their ice cream off the ground.”

“Strict as always, Rafi,” Eddie said, though he listened, pulling Manuel affectionately against his side. “You managed to make more of a mess than us, though.”

Glancing down with concern at the beige holiday suit he was wearing, Rafael was surprised to suddenly find Eddie’s hand on his face, warm, callous fingers brushing away something on his cheek.

“There,” Eddie said, wiping his fingers on a balled-up tissue he’d pulled from the pocket of his jeans.

“I see being a father has finally taught you a little sense of cleanliness,” Rafael quipped, pushing away the confusing thought of how surprisingly pleasant Eddie’s finger on his skin had felt. “Your father used to run around covered in chocolate smears and dirt if no one stopped him,” he added, turning to Manuel.

Manuel giggled. “Is that true, daddy?”

“Maybe, but Rafael wasn’t any better. Don’t let the suits fool you now.”

“That’s nothing but defamation,” Rafael gave back, turning to his ice cream again with a smile as he looked out of the unwashed window onto the street. Overhead, the sky was already dark and though he’d thought he’d only tag along to the theatre to be polite, he found himself feeling sorry that he would have to say goodbye to Eddie and his son so soon.


	5. Chapter 5

“Are you going straight home?”

Holding the door of his grandmother’s apartment building, Rafael waited for his mother to descend the small flight of stone stairs to the uneven pavement before he let the door fall shut behind himself.

“No, I told Eddie I’d be visiting you and _abuelita_ and he wanted me to drop by.”

His mother looked at him with one eyebrow arched. “I don’t think I have heard the name ‘Eddie’ as often as I have in the last month since you two were still in school.”

“Really?” Rafael asked, as if he hadn’t noticed. He buttoned up his coat. November was nearing its end and brought with it icy winds and air as cold as crystal. Even though the sun overhead was shining today, it was still a considerable amount of degrees too cold for Rafael’s taste. “Well, we never _lost_ contact.”

He didn’t know why he was feeling defensive about the fact that he had reconnected with an old friend, but he suspected it was either the circumstances of their reunion or the fact that the more time he spent with Eddie and his son, the more he regretted not being there before.

“Have you met Manuel? Too bad what happened with his mother,” Lucia said, shaking her head once.

“Yes, Manuel is a nice boy. Eddie and me took him to the theatre last weekend.”

Again, his mother’s eyebrows wandered upwards.

“You and a child?”

“They don’t immediately run from me on sight, mummy,” Rafael said.

“No, but you usually do.”

His mother, a teacher-gone-headmaster, had tried to instil in Rafael the love of children that she herself had, but Rafael had never been all the way comfortable with them. You had to approach them with an open-hearted kind of affection and love to make them understand you cared and Rafael just didn’t have that in him. However, Manuel seemed content to bridge the distance Rafael’s personality might place between them with his own straightforward attitude.

“Very funny. No, I like being around these two. They are… easy to like. Well, Eddie always was.”

“I suppose so.”

His mother had always preferred Alex over Eddie and she still wasn’t completely convinced that Rafael hadn’t done Alex an injustice, though for family peace they had decided to shelf the topic. In the past, she had rightfully noticed that Eddie was not the kind of person Rafael could hold on to if he wanted a guide on the way to success. However, she had also accepted that Rafael had always been very attached to him as a child and never tried to push him into a more fruitful direction. Maybe she’d also realised that, with things at home being as they were, it was natural Rafael would end up befriending someone who fashioned himself his protector.

“I don’t remember telling you about Eddie _that_ much,” Rafael said, wondering where his mother had actually gotten this information from.

“Mamá still talks to Maria Garcia quite a bit,” his mother reminded him. “Tell Maria I said hello,” she instructed him, as she pressed a brief kiss on his cheek to say goodbye.

“Are you sure you want me to do that? She’ll ask you to come knit things in the church group with her again.”

His mother twisted her mouth in displeasure as she considered that. Even back in the day, Rafael knew she had never really gotten along with Eddie’s mother (not that Maria had noticed).

“At least I don’t have to tell her ‘no’ every time I bring you and pick you up anymore,” she answered, resigned.

-

When Eddie opened the door, Rafael could see by the deep furrows between his eyebrows that he wasn’t in the best mood. He still all but dragged Rafael over the threshold in a hug, though he turned around again immediately, leaving Rafael to listen to him snap at Manuel while Rafael unwrapped his scarf and pulled off his coat.

“For the last time, you can go to the playground when you are done with your homework!”

“Angelo is on the playground _now_!” Manuel whined. He was sitting on the couch with his thin arms folded in front of his chest, looking no less angry than his father. “He can’t stay long!”

“Well, then you better start, hijo,” Eddie said gruffly.

Manuel kicked the legs of the couch table and pressed himself further into the corner of the old sofa, as if he was trying to physically separate himself from the colourful plastic folders on the table as much as humanly possible.

“I need a coffee,” Eddie muttered, slapping Rafael’s shoulder as he turned towards the small kitchen. “Why don’t you try to talk some sense into the boy?”

“My speciality is petulant defence attorneys, not children,” Rafael warned him quietly, but Eddie walked on without looking back.

Slowly, feeling as if he was approaching an angry cat, Rafael closed in on the couch and sat down by Manuel’s side. The boy looked up at him, still pouting.

“I wanna go play with Angelo. I can do this all weekend,” he complained.

“I want to go to Paris instead of working, but I’m not allowed to, either,” Rafael gave back and picked up an untouched worksheet he saw on top of one of the folders. “It’s pretty unfair, I agree.”

Manuel cast a doubtful glance at him, obviously not sure whether he was being made fun of.

“What is this?”

“Objects and subjects,” Manuel said, unwillingly. The words alone seemed to give him a little trouble already.

“Do you know what they are?”

“No. I don’t care.”

Apparently, Manuel was not having a good day, but Rafael decided not to let that deter him. He had spent too many years forcing English lessons down Eddie’s throat during their time in school to have a little sulking disturb him much.

“It’s easy. What’s the subject in the sentence: ‘Manuel is not doing his homework’?”

“I don’t know.”

“You are. You’re the one who’s doing something.” He waved the worksheet and raised a brow. “Or, in this case, _not_ doing something.”

Briefly, Manuel smiled, before he remembered he was actually pouting.

“And the object is ‘homework’. Do you know why?”

Manuel shook his head, but did at least deign to look at Rafael again.

“Because homework is the thing you aren’t doing. The subject does or doesn’t do something with the object,” Rafael explained. “Do you know what I mean?”

Manuel shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

The worksheet demanded of the kids to underline the subjects and objects in red and blue respectively, so Rafael dug through Manuel’s pencil case for the appropriate coloured pencils, past rubbers frayed with pencil holes, dirty bits of paper and a couple of small plastic toy figurines.

“‘Benny likes the lake’,” he read out. “Who is liking the lake here?”

“Benny.”

“So he is…”

“The… subject?” Manuel asked, knitting his brow.

“Exactly.”

Rafael put the pencil down to underline the word, but as soon as he had made the first red dot on the paper, Manuel scrambled over from his corner and, draping half over Rafael’s thighs, took the pencil from him.

“That’s mine, I’m supposed to do that,” he said.

“If you insist…”

With a lopsided smirk, Rafael watched the boy do what he was supposed to.

“‘Lake’ is the object, right?” Manuel asked, the blue pencil in hand.

“Sounds right to me.”

While Manuel worked himself down a dozen rows of samey, short sentences, Rafael threw a glance over his shoulder towards the kitchen. Eddie was leaning in the doorway, watching them with an approximation of a smile while sipping coffee out of a cup with a fading New York Giants logo.

“Rafael,” Manuel said, tugging at his sleeve. “There is no name here.”

Glancing down, Rafael saw that the teacher had evidently constructed the last sentence as a trap. It read: ‘He eats cheese.’

“What do you use ‘he’ for?” Rafael asked Manuel.

Falling sideways and stretching out over Rafael’s lap, beset with a sudden bout of exhaustion when asked to do so much thinking, Manuel chewed at the ends of his two coloured pencils.

“Uh, when you talk about someone? Like, about a boy?”

“That’s right. So ‘he’ and ‘she’ can be subjects because they are just stand-ins for the names of boys and girls.”

Well, it was probably not the exact answer, Rafael thought, but it should be enough for the demands of second grade grammar class.

So hasty he almost knocked his head against Rafael’s chin, Manuel sat up and made the last two lines.

“I’m done, papi,” he exclaimed triumphantly. “Now we can go!”

“Okay,” Eddie said, with a nod. “Rafi, are you coming with us?”

“You’re not leaving me much of a choice.”

Though Rafael wasn’t really looking forward to the prospect of sitting on an uncomfortable bench on a playground until he was frozen stiff, he was here for Eddie and Manuel, so staying at their apartment would be pointless. Besides, he could see in the tense set of Eddie’s shoulders and the dark circles under his eyes that he might need someone to talk to.

“Bit of fresh air won’t kill you,” Eddie said, as he followed Manuel to the door to pull on his old sneakers.

“Fresh air in New York? That’s optimistic.”

Manuel was all but bouncing in place with his hand on the door handle. Finally, his father nodded at him and he zipped out, leaving the door open for them. Next to Rafael, Eddie visibly deflated.

“Not a good day?” Rafael asked.

“Yeah, you could say that. Manuel’s in a bad mood because Angelo’s family will be visiting relatives in Queens for most of the weekend. Guess that’s a pretty long time for a kid,” he said, more to himself, probably in an attempt to talk himself into empathy for his son’s position. “And I was doing the shift last night and then went to help a buddy move, so I haven’t really gotten any sleep.”

Eddie locked up behind him. From the way he glanced quickly at Rafael and then away again, Rafael guessed that there was something else.

“What is it?” he asked, simply.

Eddie grinned, looking uncomfortable. “Man, you must be a bitch to face down in court. Can’t hide anything from you, huh?”

“Obviously,” Rafael said with a slim smile.

Eddie took a deep breath. “Alex called me earlier.”

Alarm bells rang shrill in Rafael’s head. He stopped short on the stairs, looking up at Eddie behind him, who almost stumbled into his back.

“What does he want from you now?”

“Come! Daddy, Rafael!”

From the first floor, Manuel’s voice echoed up the stairs. Eddie pressed his hand against the small of Rafael’s back.

“I’ll tell you on the way,” he said, and, with a self-deprecating smile, patted Rafael’s back as reassurance. “Don’t worry. I didn’t agree to do anything stupid again.”

“I know that,” Rafael said, but felt relief anyway. Even he still found the prospect that he would never lend a hand to Alex again strange to imagine. They had history that ran long and deep. Considering how the fallout of his first collaboration with Alex had hit Manuel, though, Rafael thought that he should have trusted in Eddie’s good sense more. If he wouldn’t stay on the straight narrow for his own benefit, Rafael could be sure Eddie would do it for his family. Reminding him to think of them was, after all, how he had wrenched Eddie out of Alex’s hands.

“Where is Angelo waiting?”

“Morris,” Manuel said, skipping ahead of them down the street. Now that Eddie had allowed him to go outside, it seemed like Manuel had forgiven him for making him do his homework first.

Rafael still knew the way to Morris Garden by heart; you just had to take a turn from Burnside into Morris Avenue to get there. He decided to leave the questioning for when Manuel was definitely distracted with something else. They hurried after the child until they saw Morris Garden. Fenced in towards the street, it lay in the shadow of the houses that flanked it on two sides. Despite the weather, quite a few children were crawling over the colourful metal climbing frames. Only a couple of adults braved the cold with them, though. Eddie and Rafael had a wooden bench to themselves as Manuel ran off to join a boy in the process of trying to knot the stalks of two red autumn leaves together.

“So what about Alex?” Rafael asked quietly, uncomfortably reminded of their first meeting on the topic.

“Apparently someone told him you and I are spending time together again.”

If there was one thing Rafael hadn’t missed about the community around Jerome Avenue, it was the gossip. Too many people around here still knew them – and Maria had always been someone very involved with church and other neighbourhood organisations, so it made sense that words of their rekindled friendship had reached the ears of friends and supporters of Alex.

“Am I now forbidden from that, too? I thought the problem was that I was a city hall’s lapdog. You are hardly a government official I could cosy up to,” Rafael said, the sarcasm sour on his tongue. “What did he want from you?”

“He told me not to talk to you. He said it’d make me look bad. That it makes it clear I just – wanted him to fail and I was working with you to do it.”

“You know very well that’s not what happened.”

“I guess,” Eddie said. He gave a stone a kick, sending it rolling off over the tarmac.

“It’s not, Eddie. Also, he had pictures of a fifteen year old girl naked on his phone,” Rafael spat, straining to keep his voice at a whisper. This was not a conversation the children jumping around the playground needed to be privy to. “And he is the one who used his position and money to placate his affairs. You don’t have to let him pretend he has the moral high ground on you.”

Slowly, Eddie nodded his head.

“Do I have to go now?” Rafael asked, provocatively.

“No!” Eddie put his arm around Rafael’s shoulders and jostled him a little. “Don’t be stupid. I’m not listening to Alex anymore.”

“Good.”

For a moment, they watched Manuel and Angelo, who were picking up more colourful leaves from the ground and collected them under an old coke can for reasons only know to their labyrinthine young minds.

“I just – it’s difficult, to see it turned out like this,” Eddie said.

Silently, Rafael nodded his head. Eddie rubbed at his eyes. They were a little red from the lack of sleep. He seemed to work up to something and Rafael let him, waited.

“There’s something I’ve been wondering, Rafi,” he said, eventually.

“Go on.”

“Did you and Alex ever – uh, were you ever…” Eddie glanced off to the side. “Together, or something?”

Rafael stared, and swallowed.

“How on earth did you happen on that question now?” he asked, keeping his voice steady. He was stalling; the fact that Eddie seemed to know something about his and Alex’s little tryst when he’d been so sure no one did had knocked the wind out of his sails for a moment.

“I – saw you kissing when I was younger. Like, way younger, still in school? Then there was Yelina, though, so I thought… I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t see it right.”

Looking straight ahead at Manuel, Rafael tried to sort his thoughts. It was a part of his past he was not keen to remember, considering what Alex had now turned out to be. However, his long-standing friendship with him was still what weighed heavier on his mind when he considered his losses.

“We did fool around for a few weeks when we were sixteen or seventeen,” he admitted. It hadn’t been much more than awkward teenaged groping and puppy love and he didn’t think it had gone on longer than two months. “I wanted him to be my boyfriend. He said yes, but he didn’t want to be public with a man, so I stopped it.” And, as Eddie had put it, soon enough there was Yelina.

“So... when he asked her out, did he want Yelina to be with him, or did he want Yelina to not be with you?” Eddie asked.

Rafael bit his tongue, inwardly cursing Eddie’s ability to find the heart of complicated matters that Rafael would rather stayed dead and buried. What they had done had just been experiments and whatever Alex happened to want later in life, it was painfully obvious that he was not the sort of man who had married a woman just for show; his multitude of female affairs would be difficult to explain in that case.

However, Rafael did remember a night in his early twenties when he was home from Harvard for the summer holidays, and, while Alex and him had gotten drunk in Alex’s old childhood room, Alex had kissed him. Rafael had pushed him off in shock, Yelina’s face flashing before his eyes, and Alex had blinked, like he’d woken from a dream, and had given him a regretful smile before he had turned back to his bottle. ‘I guess some chances you just miss for good,’ he’d said.

Maybe it should have been flattering, but the idea that he might have caused the first crack in the bedrock of Alex and Yelina’s marriage did not sit well with Rafael at all. “I think he used to love her.” He hoped he had. He still liked Yelina too much not to. “Maybe he still does. For some people, it’s not a contradiction, cheating on someone and loving them.”

“It is for me,” Eddie said, decisively. “Anyone who thinks they can lie to their spouse and love them anyway is just trying to make themselves feel better.”

Rafael shrugged his shoulders. He’d met all kinds in his job; he had seen murderers and rapists who had honestly loved their victims, too. Cheaters being able to do it didn’t seem so strange after all that.

“It wouldn’t work for me, either,” he said, happy to move away from the topic of Alex.

“Yeah. I did this, too.”

Eddie raised his left hand. At first, Rafael didn’t know what he was supposed to see; then he realised it was about what he wasn’t seeing. The wedding band Eddie had worn for three years after his wife had ditched him was gone.

“She doesn’t want to be my wife anymore,” he said, “and she’s not a good mother for Manny. Man, you’ve spent more time with him in the last few weeks than she has in years, Rafi. I don’t want her back.”

“Good for you,” Rafael said, squeezing Eddie’s arm for a moment. He knew how difficult it had been for Eddie to admit to himself that he was divorced, having been raised as a staunch Catholic. However, clinging on to a broken marriage for obstinacy’s sake couldn’t be the way to go.

They sat in silence for a while, watching Manuel and Angelo chase each other around in circles, the leaves already forgotten again. The wind picked up, driving grey clouds overhead, and across from them, a young woman shut her book and got up, calling Angelo’s name. She had to do it thrice before he would separate himself from Manuel.

“ _Chau_ , Eddie,” she said, as she passed them by, holding a saddened Angelo’s hand in a vice grip. “ _Hasta el lunes_.“

“ _Adiós_ ,” he answered, lifting a hand. Manuel was trailing behind Angelo and his mother. When they had left the playground, he squeezed in the gap Eddie and Rafael had left between them on the bench.

“Do you want to play some more?” Eddie asked, running a hand over Manuel’s head.

“No, it’s cold.”

“It’s probably gonna rain soon, anyway. Besides, Rafi might pass out from all this fresh air.”

“Really?” Manuel asked, grinning incredulously as he looked up at Rafael.

“No, your father just thinks he’s funny, Manuel. He’s sadly mistaken,” Rafael said dryly. Eddie reached over Manuel’s head to shove Rafael, and he felt briefly thirteen and content.

They hurried home in a drizzle, Manuel running ahead again, shouting to Rafael and Eddie to hurry. They were damp when they arrived at their doorstep and Rafael, who’d planned to return home to work on a plea deal, was easily convinced to follow Eddie upstairs and dry himself, at least.

-

While Eddie went to warm up a late lunch, Rafael let Manuel show him his history folder, a subject he seemed to be much more in favour of than grammar. Eddie joined them with their plates full of reheated, slightly soggy pasta with tomato sauce to listen in on Manuel’s explanation of how Halloween had come into being.

“Ms. Hatch says that, the, uh, _veel_ between worlds was a lot thinner back in the middle ages,” Manuel said, through a mouth full of noodles. “And that’s why dead peoples’ souls came through for that night.”

“That’s what people believed, you mean,” Rafael said, licking sauce off the spoon. Even as a teenager, Eddie had been a good cook, and he was happy to find it was a talent he seemed to have cultivated.

“No, that’s what used to happen!” Manuel insisted.

“The history teacher’s, er, special. She likes the kids at least,” Eddie said, shrugging his shoulders. “She gave them dreamcatchers for Christmas.”

“She’s really cool,” Manuel supplied.

Rafael knew that it was none of his business, but he tucked away the idea of discussing with Eddie whether he wouldn’t consider trying to get Manuel onto a different school at some point. So far, all the things he’d heard and seen concerning Manuel’s elementary school, he didn’t think that Manuel’s actually considerable intelligence was really being sharpened as much as it could have been. Still, he nodded along to Manuel’s continued explanation of the historical evidence of spirit activity in the dark ages.

The sky was already growing dark again when he took his leave. To his surprise, Manuel was distracted from the TV series he’d been watching (which featured a lot of cartoon robots punching each other) and hugged Rafael tight around the waist.

“Come by again soon, Rafi,” he said, adopting his father’s nickname for the first time.

Rafael found himself patting the boy’s head with an awkward smile. Thankfully, Manuel forgave his surprised silence and just flitted back to the couch so he would not miss the next bout of metal clashing against metal.

When Rafael left, Eddie took a step with him into the hallway, pulling the door half shut behind himself.

“Thank you for coming by today.”

“Thank you for inviting me,” Rafael said. “To be honest, I probably _wouldn’t_ have spent time outside today if it weren’t for you two. But I do, on rare occasions,” he added, bemused.

Eddie smiled briefly. He seemed distracted and he didn’t make any attempt to turn back to his door. Rafael waited, wondering what else would come now. Had Eddie not told him everything about his conversation with Alex? Was there another legal problem that had popped up related to his activities as bagman?

But Eddie didn’t say anything else. Instead, he stepped forward, grabbed Rafael’s face with both hands and kissed him on the lips.

There was a moment of hesitation there; his fingers didn’t tighten until Rafael hadn’t used his chance to jerk back and, presumably, punch him in the face. He didn’t. It was a combination of shock and a bolt of pleasure that bristled down the nerves of his spine that kept Rafael in place. Eddie briefly let one hand drop around his waist and turned him around, forcing him hard up against the wall. He bit his lower lip before he pushed his tongue between his lips. Rafael couldn’t remember ever being kissed like this – nailed to the wall with one leg between his thighs, Eddie holding his head in place and claiming his mouth like he’d been waiting years for it.

A sudden loud noise of footsteps had Eddie separate from him as if he’d touched a live wire. Rafael gasped out, a quiet, desperate sound, and gaped at his friend. Eddie stared back, looking no less confused than Rafael guessed he himself did.

“Get – get home safe, Rafi. Okay?”

As his neighbours’ kids rounded the corner to run along the hallway, Eddie fled into his apartment and pulled the door tightly shut.


	6. Chapter 6

Rafael still felt the memory of Eddie’s hands grabbing on to him days later, his hot, hungry mouth on his own and the taste of him on his tongue – mostly that of beer, which perhaps went a way to explain how Eddie, the good Catholic boy who’d been too proper to really divorce a woman who had left him three years ago, had ended up making out with a man in the hallway before his apartment. Still, it had not exactly felt like an idle experiment. There was need behind that kiss; whether it was for Rafael or for a man in general, he didn’t know, but obviously Eddie had been struggling to contain it.

Very evident, too, was that Eddie was trying to re-erect the dam after it had collapsed. Over the last few weeks, Rafael had always been able to count on finding one or two messages by Eddie on his phone every other day at least. They might be comments on his work at Rikers, something he’d seen on TV concerning the mayoral election, about Manuel’s grades, or just asking whether Rafael had gotten home okay after he had argued a difficult case in court. Now that they were suddenly missing, Rafael quickly and painfully realised how much he had gotten used to Eddie’s presence in his life again. Even the more focused communication had stopped; they had been planning to go to the zoo with Manuel, since Rafael had told him at some point that he hadn’t been in nearly twenty-five years now, but Rafael’s last proposal of possible dates stayed unanswered.

Usually, Rafael would not have even bothered to think about this kind of behaviour. It just happened to be that he was a person who attracted men in the closet; the way he acted and dressed was just flashy enough that most people did suspect that he was not completely straight, but he was not so flamboyant that men who would rather not think too deeply about their urges couldn’t use him as their experimentation platform. For his part, he now thought himself much too old to still talk people through their first steps on the path to self-acceptance. He had done his social duty in too many ill-fated would-be relationships and wanted a partner who did not agonise about the very fact that he happened to be attracted to his boyfriend.

But where he could have left other people by the wayside for being too much work for often too little reward – this was Eddie and he could not so easily forget about him. Whether he kissed Rafael or another man, Rafael wanted to know that Eddie didn’t forcefully lock himself inside the expectations set for him by his priest and father and denied himself what he wanted.

And he had not disliked kissing Eddie, either.

He knew Eddie too well to push him now, though. If Eddie didn’t respond to him within ten days or so, Rafael planned on sending him a neutral message that showed that he was not mad at him, at least, and then he could see what Eddie did with that. For now, the ball was in his court.

However, his job would have it that their paths crossed earlier than that. Matthew Cornell, a perp who had been convicted on charges related to human trafficking half a year ago, had now apparently had a change of heart after becoming a Christian in prison and wanted to speak about the people he had worked with. As soon as he heard about it, Rafael decided that he would be very surprised if that was all there was to his new outlook; he would rather guess that life in prison suddenly made snitching in exchange for some favours from the justice system seem like a much better idea. Still, he was always willing to listen even to dishonestly contrite information if it meant that he might stick a few more people who deserved it behind bars.

The morning that he was to drive up to Rikers, Rafael sent Eddie a quick message.

_I’ll be there to talk to one of your customers at twelve. Is it your shift?_

About half an hour later, when he was already packing his briefcase for the trip, Rafael heard his phone buzz against the table.

_im here_

Well, that was as uninformative as possible. Rafael frowned at the message and pocketed the phone. At least Eddie had managed to type a reply at all, although he doubted that he was up for spending lunch together, considering how curt it was.

A C.O. was waiting for him when he got out of the cab at Rikers, greeted by thick drops of rain and air that felt like wading into a cold bath. Shivering even under his coat, he hurried towards the uninviting, reinforced doors.

To his surprise, he found Eddie in the lobby, dressed in his blue uniform, the shirt folded up to his elbows, revealing sinewy arms. He was talking to a colleague when Rafael’s companion waved a hand and pointed at him.

“Here’s your A.D.A., Eddie,” the guard who’d led him inside said. “Mr. Garcia asked to be the one to show you around, Mr. Barba.”

“How nice of him,” Rafael said, an expectant gaze on Eddie.

“Hey, Rafael,” Eddie said. He had the good grace to look uncomfortable for hiding from Rafael for the last week; or maybe he was just feeling sorry about kissing him.

Rafael joined his side. “Nice to see you again.”

“You ready to go?” Eddie asked, meeting his eyes briefly. “Give your coat and briefcase here,” he nodded towards another officer next to the security scanner and Rafael did. The security procedures weren’t news to him; they had tightened considerably in many correctional facilities. He checked his phone again before tucking it into the pocket of his coat and handing it to the security officer, who ran it through the baggage scanner. Rafael stepped through the man-high plastic rectangle; a red light switched on overhead. He was wondering if he’d forgotten change in his pockets when Eddie stepped up to him.

“Can you spread your arms?” he asked.

“Are you going to frisk me? How exciting,” Rafael said, chipper, as he did as he was told. He knew the colleagues would just take it as a joke between friends, but Eddie stared at him in mild terror for a moment and then grew a shade of pink. Rafael knew he was being a bit of an ass, but Eddie deserved it for his childish radio silence.

It was a good thing Eddie probably didn’t kiss most visitors before they came through here or Rafael imagined smuggling weapons into Rikers would have become child’s play. Eddie’s hands hovered over him more than they touched him when he checked Rafael.

“Try again without your shoes,” he mumbled.

Rafael pulled off his shoes and did; this time, the machine was satisfied with him. Eddie threw a glance at Rafael’s polka-dotted socks. Rafael could see he wanted to say something, for a moment, and felt a sudden twinge of intense sadness because of the wall that was up between them now.

“This way,” Eddie said, fumbling with his keys and opening a security door, after Rafael had put his shoes back on.

They walked silently along a corridor with office and bathroom doors to both sides. Before Eddie could open the next door, however, Rafael touched his shoulder.

“If you aren’t going to talk to me, why did you ask to chaperone me?”

Eddie hesitated. “This is a dangerous place,” he said. “If you’re here, I keep an eye on you, Rafi.” Again, he paused. “That’s still okay, right?”

“Of course it is,” Rafael said. He wanted to add that there was no reason for Eddie _not_ to be around him even when they were not surrounded by felons, but the door behind them opened again to let in a couple more guards and he fell quiet. Eddie opened up.

They were the first in the empty room. A table stood in the middle with a pair of handcuffs bolted to it. Rafael glanced up at where he knew the security cameras to be before he sat down.

“What are you gonna do with Cornell, anyway?” Eddie asked.

Considering he would be around for the interrogation for Rafael’s protection, Rafael didn’t think it mattered whether he told him now.

“He wants to confess,” Rafael said, raising a brow. “Not his own crimes, in this case, but those of others. Said he found God in here and he would like to talk to me again to give me names.”

“He’s a Christian?” Eddie asked, doubtfully. “Don’t think I ever saw him talking to the priest.”

“I had a feeling the repentance might not be solely inspired by higher powers,” Rafael said. “Maybe he thinks he can strike some sort of plea deal after the fact. We _are_ missing a lot of his friends, though, so I am inclined to at least listen. It can’t hurt.”

Eddie nodded his head. Though the room was empty so far, he was hovering by Rafael’s shoulder as Rafael pulled out the thick file he had accumulated on the case. He was itching to talk to Eddie about private matters, but he needed to concentrate right now. Cornell had always been someone who got you tripped up in the details. His defence attorney had been less of a hassle than he himself at the trial.

The minutes ticked by. Eddie shifted behind him, glancing at the clock on the wall, then got out his walkie-talkie.

“Yo, this is Garcia,” he said. “I’m waiting for Cornell with the A.D.A.. What’s the hold-up?”

“They should already be there with you,” the voice from the other end said, crackling slightly. “Yeah, there they come, I see them on the camera. Open the door, Smith got his hands full.”

As Eddie marched to the door, Rafael leafed back to the cover page of the file so Cornell didn’t get a look at his hand, as it were. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Eddie opening the door for two men.

Eddie stood still for a second. Then, suddenly, he jumped backwards and threw the door shut, leaning hard against it as it refused to close. “It’s not Smith, it’s an inmate!” He snapped into his walkie-talkie. “Back-up! Now!”

Uselessly, Rafael stared as the door was thrown open, making Eddie stumble backward, only catching himself when he hit the table. Adrenaline finally flooded his veins like an infusion of icy water as two men burst into the room. One was Cornell, without handcuffs; the other was dressed as a prison guard, but considering the fact that he turned and jumped Eddie like a wild dog, he probably wasn’t.

Rafael bolted up out of his chair and tried to bring the table between himself and Cornell. Behind him, he heard someone grunting in pain, sharp breaths, the sound of Eddie and the guard scuffling. Rafael tried not to get in their way – which was all the help he could be to Eddie in a fight, that hadn’t changed –, but there were only so many places he could go to escape Cornell, who was coming straight for him.

He tried to make a run for the door, wondering if that was exactly the wrong way, if there were more inmates waiting. However, he was just reaching for the handle when Cornell was on him.

Rafael went down hard. His chin hit the ground, pain exploding in his skull. When he could gasp for air again, Cornell had turned him around and sat down on his stomach.

He wrapped his hands around Rafael’s throat and only allowed himself a triumphant grin when he felt Rafael’s fingers scramble uselessly against his own, not strong enough to pry them off. Panic clouded Rafael’s mind as air grew sparse, and he flailed helplessly, knowing that soon he wouldn’t be able to move. Already his fingers lost their grip around Cornell’s hands. There were black flames licking at the edges of his vision.

A boot hit Cornell in the back with a loud _thud_ , bending him forward. He croaked a wordless noise as he let go off Rafael. Before he had a chance to do so much as get up, Eddie grabbed him by the back of the orange prison suit, pulled him up and dragged him sideways off Rafael. Somewhere on the ground, Rafael saw the man in the prison guard’s uniform, curled up and holding his bleeding face.

Eddie was struggling with Cornell in a headlock, the inmate kicking and punching at everything he could reach, when the reinforcements barrelled through the door. They grabbed Cornell’s left and right arm, forcing him face-down on the ground, just as Rafael managed to get to his knees. He shook like a leaf. Looking up at Eddie, he saw his lip was bleeding. Their eyes met.

Eddie slowly let go off Cornell, still staring at Rafael. Finally, he tore himself away, when four people were securing Cornell at all limbs, and hastened towards him.

“Rafi, are you okay?” he asked, grabbing his face, which caused a strange flashback to the meeting in the hallway in Rafael’s confused mind. Eddie bent his head back to look at the bruises which might now be blooming on his neck – although in about 50 per cent of incidents of strangulation, there was no outer mark. Those were the facts an SVU attorney knew by heart. A humourless smile crept onto Rafael’s lips.

It would have felt much more honest to shake his head, but Rafael knew that Eddie needed information on his actual physical state. 

“Yes,” he said. His voice was unexpectedly rough.

“We’re going to the hospital wing in a bit, we’ll just wait for things to be under control,” Eddie said, somewhat breathless. The blood on his knuckles wasn’t his own, Rafael guessed.

“Are you alright?” Rafael asked, peering at the blood dripping down Eddie’s lip.

“Don’t worry, Rafi. This is my job.”

That Eddie was there with him, taking care of the people trying to bash Rafael’s face in, was reliving history; but back in the day, no one had actively tried to kill him, and Eddie had been hot-blooded and excited and pissed after a fight. Rafael could still see the anger brimming in him now, but professionalism straightened his movements, kept him calm. He put his arm around Rafael to help him to his unsteady feet.

“Is this all? We got any more problems?” Eddie asked one of his colleagues.

“There’s the two guys who knocked out Smith, but they should have a lid on that now,” one guard kneeling beside the man in the guard’s uniform said.

“I gotta bring Mr. Barba to the hospital ward. Cornell throttled him.”

There were a dozen guards in the room now, making sure the two men on the ground stayed there. One of them let go of his charge to join Eddie and Rafael, who hoped he didn’t look quite as pale and shaky as he thought he must.

“I’m coming, just in case. Mr. Barba, can you walk?”

“Yes, I should manage to stay upright.”

He felt Eddie’s hand in his back, fingers spanning right between his shoulder blades. Before he let the two guards escort him out, he threw another look at Cornell on the ground, swallowing.

“How the hell did this happen?” Eddie asked, rage still like an electric undercurrent in his voice.

“No idea yet, but they must’ve been planning it for a while. Mr. Barba was obviously their target.”

“They had to know they wouldn’t get away with it. Even if they had – even if it had worked out.”

Eddie didn’t seem to be able to bring the sentence to its logical conclusion, which was Rafael dead on the ground, and Rafael appreciated it.

“Cornell will do so many years, I doubt he thought it mattered,” Rafael said, quietly. “Who was the other guy?”

“Friend of his he made in here, name Giorno.”

“Doesn’t sound familiar,” Barba said.

“That’s one of the guys who used to run with the mobsters you threw in here a couple months ago,” Eddie said. “He shot five guys.”

That would explain his motivation and Rafael guessed that he, too, had sentences which were long and severe enough that another attempted murder didn’t really make a difference. Instinctively, he found himself drifting towards Eddie, who rubbed his thumb over Rafael’s back when he noticed.

A male nurse greeted them in the stale air of the hospital wing, where Rafael sat down on a bed which had leather belts hanging off its sides, presumably to secure the less willing patients. While Eddie and the other guard talked into their walkie-talkies, assessing the situation, Rafael was made to bare his throat and turn his head this way and that while the nurse pressed on his damaged skin.

“This is going to leave some nasty bruises, but otherwise, you seem fine,” the nurse told him. “Still, with this kind of injury, problems can occur days after the fact. If you’ve got any trouble breathing or you find you’re more forgetful than usual, you need to go to the ER immediately. Blood clots could be forming in your throat while you’re healing and the lack of oxygen might have damaged your brain.”

“Brilliant,” Barba muttered. “I wish he had just broken a few ribs instead.” Raising his eyes, he saw that Eddie had stepped to the food of the bench, nervously looking at Rafael as if he was in danger of spontaneous combustion. “You should get looked at, too,” he told him.

“It’s nothing. I took a few punches, but I didn’t hit my head or anything,“ Eddie said, turning to the nurse. “I’d rather you take your time with Raf… Mr. Barba.“

“This is all I can do for him at the moment, anyway. Come here, Eddie.”

Rafael was not sure whether he liked that the nurse knew Eddie by his first name. Hopefully that was just because he transported prisoners down here or because he was an amicable guy who made friends easily, not because he was a regular guest. Rafael got up to make room for Eddie and sat down in a chair that was bolted to the floor, feeling his pulse in his burning throat. Eddie was made to lift his shirt, revealing a lean, muscled upper body that had two scars Rafael didn’t remember from when they were kids, and one he did, which was the result of an upperclassman lounging at Eddie with a broken bottle of glass, cutting right across his stomach, a then terrifying wound that had now turned into a slim, ragged, white line. He wondered when the new ones had been etched into Eddie’s skin.

“You’re good to go,” the nurse said, after a moment. “Just gotta wipe off that blood. Wouldn’t kiss anyone for a few days, maybe, that could hurt.”

Unwittingly, Eddie raised his gaze and met Rafael’s, quickly averted it again.

“Yeah, right,” he said, forcing a grin.

“We called the police, so you’ll have to wait here for a bit, Mr. Barba. Do you want to lie down?”

“No. I need my phone back, though, I have to call my secretary that I won’t make it to my next meetings. It’s best I wait outside.”

“You should go to the doctor and have him put you on medical leave for a few days, too,” the nurse said. “It’d be best to keep your head still while you recover.”

While Eddie arranged his uniform, the other guard was calling for the head of the institution to meet Rafael in the lobby. He waited until Eddie had tucked his shirt under his belt before nodding at him.

“Come,” Eddie said, offering Rafael a hand to pull him out of the chair, which he took. The way Eddie looked at what Rafael suspected were the red strangulation marks reminded him of the way Eddie used to look at Rafael when he came to school after an altercation with his father – pity and fear mixed in with guilt that he hadn’t been able to prevent it.

“Thank you,” Rafael said, hanging back behind the guard who was leading them down the hallway.

“I shouldn’t have opened the door without waiting for Smith to say something,” Eddie just answered. “I would’ve known it wasn’t his voice.”

“Your colleague told you to.” With only the view from the security camera and the guard’s hat obscuring the inmate’s face, Rafael imagined that he hadn’t been able to see that the man leading the prisoner was not a fellow guard.

“Yeah, and I still shouldn’t have. Christ, you almost died!”

“Well, thanks to you, I didn’t.”

Out in the lobby, away from the cramped labyrinth of hallways that he could never remember how exactly to navigate, Rafael felt some of the tension fall off of him. The shock was still deep in his bones, but, with sunlight winking through the windows and the walls opening up around him, Rafael could believe he’d made a successful escape.

Eddie’s walkie-talkie was already talking at him again, requesting his assistance in emptying the cafeteria.

“Rafi, are you gonna be alright here?”

“I’ll be safer than you going back in.”

“It’s fine, it’s not a riot or anything.”

Still visibly uneasy, Eddie squeezed his shoulder. Rafael, for his part, just wished that things between them were not so strained right now. Being far from a physical person, there were very few people in the world whose presence he would have enjoyed in his personal space after having just been strangled. Hugging Eddie, however, ensuring himself that they were both still there, that they were okay, that, he imagined, would have eased his mind a bit.

Eddie dropped his hand and hurried back through security, leaving Rafael to try and distract himself with his work from the thought of Cornell on top of him and Eddie back in there. While he stared at his phone, his fingers brushed compulsively against the hot, angry skin of his throat.


	7. Chapter 7

“What happened to you?”

Liv looked like she was resisting the urge to pull down the collar of Rafael’s shirt. As it turned out, Rafael had not found a way to hide the bruises without wrapping himself into an oversized scarf that might have drawn more attention when worn inside than the strangulation marks themselves, so he had resigned himself to showing them proudly, as a survivor might.

“Remember that I told you Cornell wanted to talk to me about the people he used to work with?”

“Yes…”

Judging by her expression, she seemed to have guessed where this was headed.

“Well, talking wasn’t what he had in mind.” Rafael raised a brow. “He conspired with a mobster, beat down a guard and snuck over to the interrogation room. Eddie and me against two thugs with a grudge – it was almost nostalgic.”

His smile was acerbic.

“Eddie was the guard on duty with you?”

“And probably the reason I’m still alive.”

Liv shook her head. “Are you okay?”

“Not really,” Rafael said matter-of-factly. “It’s not the first time someone’s threatened to kill me, but it _is_ the first honest attempt. There’s a reason I’m not on the executive side of things.”

With a compassionate smile, she touched his arm.

“What about Eddie?”

“A few bruises, but he was fine. Went right back into the fray, though by the time I got out of the hospital wing, things seemed mostly back under control.”

“Maybe you should try to go home on time tonight. This looks rough and neck injuries can be dangerous.”

“So the nurse told me. I missed most of my appointments yesterday sitting around at Rikers, though, and my doctor won’t be doing them for me.”

Speaking of work, his phone was now for a second time within under a minute vibrating in the pocket of his jacket. Someone apparently was in dire need of his attention. Rafael took it out and found himself surprised to see Eddie’s home number.

“Sorry – did you have anything else new on Hiller? I should take this,” he told Liv

“No, we’re done.”

Rafael nodded his head and excused himself. The evening after the attack, Eddie had written him a message asking whether Rafael was feeling alright, a question he had given straight back. Eddie had only answered: _Im worried about what the nurse said bout blood clots. Wish I could keep an eye on u_

Rafael hadn’t known what to say. As he had laid back staring at the glowing rectangle of his phone, the darkness seeping in from all corners, he had wished that Eddie was there with him, too, but he hadn’t thought that was a helpful thing to write, or to think.

“Eddie, what is it?” he asked into the phone.

“Rafael?” a small, high voice said, at the other end.

“Manuel?” Rafael asked, surprised.

“I didn’t know if it was really your number. Daddy put it on – on the phone table, for _abuela_ , but, I think, I don’t know if she saw – uh, it was a while ago...”

Now that he was babbling, Rafael heard the hiccup and chocking in his voice and found himself straightening up, stomach pulling itself into a ball.

“Manuel, what’s going on?”

“I tried calling _abuela_ and, and I – Ms. Williams from downstairs isn’t home from work…”

“Manuel,” Rafael repeated. He could feel the boy’s panic tugging at his own nerves, but his voice remained cool. Pressing a finger to his free ear, he walked out of the busy police office into the hallway. “What happened?”

“I don’t know! They wouldn’t tell me! Papi’s work called and said they brought him to a hospital. They wouldn’t tell me what happened, though!”

Rafael thought the earth under his feet shifted for a moment. Luckily, curveballs were his specialty and the fact that Manuel was in need of someone to keep it together was a very powerful motivation.

“Are you home alone?”

“Yes. _Abuela_ is with her friend. She forgets to charge her phone all the time. I think that’s why she’s not picking up...”

“Okay. I’m coming over to get you, alright, Manny? Do you know which hospital your father is at?”

“Uh, no.” At the other end of the line, Manuel sniffed noisily. “Something with Mount Queens, but I didn’t understand it all.”

“Mount Sinai Queens?” Rafael asked. He knew that was one of the hospitals closest to Rikers Island. They had met guards there before.

“Yeah, I think, I think that was the word,” Manuel said, relieved.

“I know that hospital. We’re going to visit your daddy, Manny.”

If he was dead, Rafael wondered, would they have told Manuel? More likely, they wouldn’t have said anything at all.

“Okay,” Manuel agreed, voice small.

While he had been talking to Manuel, Rafael had already hastened down the steps and out the door. Obviously, now had to be the one damn time that there was no cab whizzing by in midtown Manhattan, so he would have to cut Manuel off.

“Listen, Manuel, I have to hang up and call a cab. It’ll take me half an hour, maybe. Will you be okay? You’ve been home alone before, right?”

“After school, when _abuela_ was at the store or visiting Ms. Williams.”

“Then you know what to do?”

“Don’t open the door for anyone, uh, anyone but you, now. Don’t use the stove. Don’t leave the fridge open,” Manuel said, still sniffling.

“Very good. I’ll be right there. Call me if you need anything.”

Rafael sat tense in the back of the cab, for once in his life wishing that he had a driver who threw himself into traffic with the usual reckless abandon of New York taxi drivers, at least until they had the kid in the car as well. It seemed to take forever until the houses finally grew shorter, Spanish advertisements began to be interspersed with the English ones and Rafael was so familiar with the streets that he had to stop himself from giving the driver instructions on how to get to their goal a few seconds faster.

“Wait here,” he told him, before he jumped out of the car to ring the doorbell. The door didn’t have an intercom system, so Manuel could only open up. When he had walked upstairs he saw, with a bit of relief, that Manuel hadn’t opened the door to the apartment yet, though. His job made him appreciate any child trained in basic safety rules.

“It’s Rafael, Manny,” Rafael said, knocking at the door.

Immediately, the door was pulled open. Manuel had already put on his sneakers and jacket. His eyes were red from crying and still swimming with tears.

“Can we go to daddy?” he asked, obviously trying his level best to sound brave.

“In a moment. I need to write a message for your _abuela_.”

As he passed him by, Rafael gently patted Manuel’s shoulder. He didn’t know what else to do. Did he know Manuel well enough to hug him, or would that just make the child uncomfortable? Putting the question away for later, he tore a sheet of paper from Manuel’s school writing pad and scribbled a quick message: ‘Manuel got a call from Rikers that Eddie is in the hospital. We don’t know what for yet. He couldn’t reach you, so he called me and I’m taking him to Mount Sinai Queens in Astoria to see Eddie.’

He signed with his name and wrote his phone number down as well while Manuel was standing in the door, rocking from his toes to his heels and back.

“Do you have your key?” Rafael asked.

Manuel halted, then ran back into the kitchen and grabbed a New York Giants key chain off the counter. Rafael switched off the lights and stepped outside, waiting for Manuel to lock the door behind them. They descended the stairs in silence, Rafael still unsure what to say when he himself knew so little about what was going on with Eddie, and Manuel chewing his bottom lip.

However, as they had climbed into the back of the taxi, Manuel did not crawl over to the left of the backseat, but stayed in the middle spot, scooting closer to Rafael and tucking himself against his side, his face a picture of misery.

Rafael handed him the seatbelt and put his arm around Manuel’s shoulders. Childcare might not have been his strong suit, but he was not totally devoid of general empathy and Manuel was looking for comfort. In a way, it calmed him down, too, to have someone to silently commiserate with, even if it was a very young someone.

“Daddy is going to be fine, right?”

“I’m sure he will be. You know your dad, he’s strong.”

Manuel nodded his head, though he didn’t look all the way convinced.

“I wish he wouldn’t work in prison, you know?” he said, quietly. “He gets hurt a lot.”

“The prison is dangerous. But people do need good C.O.s or all the criminals would be back on the streets,” Rafael explained.

“Not papi,” Manuel insisted, petulantly, hugging Rafael’s arm to himself.

Rafael didn’t answer; he agreed with Manuel. It would have been a weight off his mind if Eddie would have found a different job, especially after yesterday’s very hands-on demonstration of the dangers and then today… he wondered if those two incidents were connected. Had Eddie drawn the ire of Cornell’s and the other man’s friends?

While he was thinking about yesterday, Rafael had thoughtlessly raised his fingers to his throat again, which got Manuel’s attention. He sat up straighter and, as he looked up at Rafael, his eyes suddenly filled with tears once more.

“Your neck is hurt,” he said, choked. “All around.”

“I’m fine,” Rafael was quick to assure him. He could imagine it was scary for the child that the only person who he’d been able to call for help showed clear signs that he might be rather easily dispatched, too, which would have left Manuel all alone.

“Luisa put her scarf around Vincenca’s neck in school the other day and pulled really hard. My teacher said people die if you squeeze them around the neck too hard.”

The last words were lost in sobs and, after a brief, panicked moment of helplessness under the worried gaze of the (thankfully silent) taxi driver, Rafael pulled Manuel against his side.

“Manny, they die because they can’t get enough air when someone squeezes their neck too tight. They don’t die afterwards.” Not usually, but he didn’t think it was wise to trouble Manuel with the whole blood clot story now. “I’m not going to die.”

“Really?”

“Promise. And neither is your father.”

Rafael reached into his pocket and found a package of tissues, from which he pulled one and handed it to Manuel so he could get rid of the tears and snot that were running over his face. He balled it up against his nose and pressed even tighter against Rafael’s side.

When they finally arrived in front of the red-brick hospital, Rafael tipped the driver mostly for having stayed quiet for the ride instead of regaling them with well-meant anecdotes or attempting to talk to a child that was already disturbed. They got out of the car with Manuel still holding his hand. He walked up to the nurse at the most reception-looking counter in the hospital’s lobby.

“How can I help you?” the nurse asked, looking down at Manuel with a friendly smile.

“I’m looking for Eduardo Garcia. He should have arrived here from Rikers – a C.O., not a prisoner.”

Nodding her head, she started diligently typing away.

“He did arrive here about two hours ago. He’s… well, let’s see. Let me go call the doctor.”

She left the desk to her colleague, who was sipping coffee while he dug through patient files, to vanish in the back. Manuel’s fingers were tight around Rafael’s and Rafael felt his pulse in his throat again, painful against his bruised flesh.

“One of the doctors will be right out,” the nurse said, returning. “If you’ll wait over there?”

With Manuel in tow, Rafael walked to a group of chairs, telling himself that she wouldn’t have looked so cheerful if they were about to be told that Eddie had died. They had barely sat down when a door opened, revealing a young woman in a white coat. She looked around through her black-rimmed glasses and saw the nurse pointing towards Manuel and Rafael.

“You’re here for Mr. Garcia?”

“Yes,” Rafael said, getting up again.

“And you are his son, and…”

“A friend. Rafael Barba.”

“Oh.” She frowned slightly. “Well, if you’re not related to Mr. Garcia, then I’m afraid I can’t tell you about his state.”

Of course. Rafael briefly cursed himself that he hadn’t just claimed to be the husband.

“I’m sorry, Doctor…”

“Bering.”

“Doctor Bering – I understand you have to adhere to rules of professional discretion, but I _do_ have a relative of his with me and I really don’t need details,” he said, with the most charming smile he could muster under the circumstances. “We just have to know his general state – will we be here for the afternoon, or rather for the week?”

“Well, it’s not as dramatic as that,” Doctor Bering said, with a quick glance at Manuel’s tear-stained face. “At the moment, Mr. Garcia is sleeping off the anaesthesia, but when he wakes up, we will ask him whether he wants to see you and you’ll be able to talk to him. I expect that’ll be this evening. He’s not critically injured.”

Though Rafael was tempted to ask why he was under anaesthesia, he knew he had pushed the doctor quite far already. Instead, he tried a grateful smile. “We’ll be waiting here.”

“What does that mean?” Manuel asked, as the doctor walked away. “What’s happening to daddy?”

“She can’t tell us a lot because we don’t have an adult relative of your father’s with us,” Rafael explained. “But it sounds like he’ll be good to talk to us later, when he wakes up. I think they probably might have had to do a little operation. He’s going to be okay, though. He’s definitely not going to die,” he added, hastily.

For the first time today, Manuel gave a little smile.

“Okay,” he said.

“We’ll wait here until he feels better. I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you.” Rafael looked around. “It could take a while, though. I saw a small store just outside. We should at least get something to drink.”

After telling the nurse at the reception they would be right back, the two of them crossed the street. The store reminded Rafael of the one they had been in after going to the theatre, something that seemed a thousand years ago right now. He allowed Manuel to pick out some neon-coloured sugary drink and bought them pre-packaged sandwiches to complement the healthy meal, taking two water bottles and a bag of trail mix as well for his conscience. Passing by a corner stuffed with magazines and soft cover bestsellers, he halted. If Eddie had to stay in the hospital, he’d probably be bored, and though he wasn’t much of a reader, Rafael grabbed an issue of _Sports Illustrated_ that he would probably appreciate.

“Do you want anything to read, Manny?” Rafael asked, indicating the brightly coloured covers of the children’s section with one hand. “We might have to wait a few hours.”

“Which book?” Manuel asked.

“I don’t know, what kind of books do you like?”

Manuel shrugged his shoulders. While Rafael knew Eddie was a good father, it made sense Manuel hadn’t learned a lot about the love of literature through his relatives. Maria had always preferred TV to the written word as well.

Of course, this left Rafael wondering what exactly a seven year old boy was likely enough to enjoy so much that it would distract him from his unconscious father. Thankfully, a copy of _Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone_ was propped up right in the front. He checked, quickly, whether this was the first issue of however many books had come out in this series and presented it to Manuel.

“This could be fun,” he said. Truthfully, he’d never read it, but it was just about the most popular book in the world next to the bible, so it seemed a safe bet.

“Angelo likes the movies of that,” Manuel said, with a nod.

Having found a book that was Angelo-approved, Rafael let the clerk stuff their goods into a plastic bag and paid. Back in the hospital, they set up shop in a corner of the mostly-empty waiting room area. Manuel’s eyes had finally dried.

“Can you read the book to me?” he asked Rafael.

Since this was hardly the right situation to get pedagogical about reading practice with the poor boy and Rafael was happy for a distraction himself, he took the book out of the bag with a nod. Manuel leaned against his shoulder, munching his tuna sandwich, as Rafael began.

“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal…”

-

Harry had just found a wand that fit him in Mr. Ollivander’s shop when a nurse approached them.

“Are you Mr. Garcia’s family?”

“So to speak, yes,” Rafael said, closing the book with his finger between the pages, his heart in his throat. Next to him, Manuel sat up straight, all ears. “His son and a friend.”

“He’s awake now and he would like to see you.”

While Manuel jumped to his feet, Rafael quickly stuffed all their half-eaten food and open bottles back into the plastic bag and collected their jackets. At first, Manuel looked ready to bolt ahead of them, but the big, broad, white hallways quickly sent him back to Rafael’s side clinging to his hand. The nurse led them to a recovery room which contained six beds partitioned off with plastic curtains.

Eddie was in the bed next to the window, which looked out onto a dark street that framed his white hospital bed and a face of a similar colour. When he saw Manuel and Rafael, however, he smiled, wincing as he sat up a little.

“Hey, mijo, you doin’ good? Where’s _abuela_?”

“Someone called and said you were here and she wasn’t at home. And I couldn’t call her! I think she forgot to charge her phone again.”

Eddie sighed.

“Mamá and technology never went well together,” he said, looking up at Rafael with pleased surprise. Whatever else had happened between them evidently retreated into the background for now. "So you called Rafi?”

“His number was still by the phone. And you said he’s so smart. I thought he’d know what to do...”

“Yeah, he usually does. You did great, Manny. Getting Rafael was a good idea.”

Eddie ruffled Manuel’s hair, tugging him closer to the bed as he looked up at Rafael.

“Thanks for taking care of him, Rafi. I’m sorry we’ve been so much trouble lately.”

“Your son is not trouble. You, sometimes,” Rafael said, with a lopsided smirk. “Though I was wondering whether my visit to your workplace might have had something to do with this.”

“Good guess,” Eddie said, with a nod.

“What happened, daddy?”

“One of those _pendejos_ stabbed me. Didn’t hit anything important, but the knife’s blade broke off and got stuck. They thought it was safer to put me under while they got it out.”

Rafael wondered if that was not too graphic for a kid to know, but Manuel just leaned his head against his father’s shoulder.

“Are they going to get in trouble?” Manuel asked.

“I damn well hope so. Best thing about this is that they’ll try to get some of these mobsters into another prison so we don’t have them all causing trouble together,” he said, looking back up at Rafael. “Not that it ever helps for long, but they’ll probably lay low for a bit.”

“One can hope.”

Though Rafael knew it was irrational, he did feel guilt coiling in the pit of his stomach.

“How long do you have to stay here?”

“Just overnight. And I’ll be home all week,” he told Manny, rubbing his back with his flat hand. “It’ll be fun.”

At that moment, Rafael’s standard issue ringtone sounded. He got out his phone to see Eddie’s home number again.

“I think your mom wants to talk to you,” he said, picking up just as he pressed the phone into Eddie’s hand. The sound of Maria’s voice was well audible even without holding the phone. Manuel smiled slightly at Rafael while Eddie did his best to reassure his mother in Spanish that he was not going to perish.

Eddie still looked tired, so after Eddie had let Manuel tell him about the ride in the taxi, Rafael decided that they should probably leave him to get a bit of rest. He put the _Sports Illustrated_ on the table next to him.

“Thought you might like a distraction,” he said.

“Thanks,” Eddie said, brightening a little as he saw the title.

“Don’t worry. I wasn’t going to bring you homework,” Rafael said.

Eddie grinned. Rafael had spent a lot of time as a child trying to make him read.

“Rafi bought a book for me, too. It’s fun,” Manuel said. “I’ll tell you what happened when you’re home.”

“Looking forward to it, mijo.” He kissed Manuel on the top of his head. “Be good, okay? Don’t make trouble for your _abuela_.”

“I won’t.”

After hugging his father around the neck, Manuel stepped back and took Rafael’s hand again, waving with the other as Rafael pulled the curtain aside.


	8. Chapter 8

“Rafael, are you sure you don’t want any more to eat? There is still plenty left on the stove.”

“Thanks, Maria,” Rafael said, holding up his hands in surrender. “It was very good, but I couldn’t eat another bite.”

After she had recovered from the shock of her son being brought to the hospital and her grandchild ending up alone and distraught, Maria’s first order of business had been to invite Rafael over to dinner at his earliest convenience to thank him for his help. Though Rafael didn’t think that was necessary, he had gladly accepted because he knew it would afford him another chance to speak to Eddie, now that the doors between them had been pushed open a fraction.

Manuel was staying over at Angelo’s, since it wasn’t a school night, so it was just Eddie, Maria and him around the table, which Eddie now began clearing of empty plates. Despite the injury, he was already moving rather fast again after barely more than a week.

“Well, I’m off to the church group now,” Maria said, while she stuck her wallet in her purse. “Eddie, you’ll offer Rafael something to drink.”

“Obviously, mamá,” Eddie said.

“Sorry I can’t stay any longer, Rafael, but we have a very important discussion concerning the Christmas party tonight,” she said solemnly.

“It’s fine. I’m sure Eddie and I can entertain ourselves.”

Throwing a glance over his shoulder, he saw in the moment of trepidation on Eddie’s face that he knew Rafael intended to use tonight to have the conversation Eddie had been so diligently dodging.

“Oh, you always did. Just leave the house standing,” Maria said with a smile as she patted Rafael’s hand. “Good night, boys.”

The door closed behind her, leaving them alone in a comfortable room smelling of chicken stew, the silent hum of the radiator a familiar background noise. Eddie grabbed two bottles of beer from the fridge.

“Have you heard from your case yet?” Rafael asked. Despite the fact that he did want to talk about the kiss, going straight in seemed a bit merciless. He had an inkling that his deeply Catholic friend would have been fighting his own demons for the past weeks and those must have been asking very tough questions. Rafael had been down that road, too, albeit many years ago.

“Yeah, they already passed it on to an A.D.A. Lean, though I think they switched it up now – uh, the new one’s called Rahim.”

“Good,” Rafael said, sipping from his bottle.

“You know these people?”

“I talked to an acquaintance at the D.A.’s office there,” Rafael admitted, following Eddie into the living room. “Convinced him that Rahim needed the practice – she transferred from Manhattan, so I’ve met her before. She’s pretty new out of the private sector, but talented. And trust me, if anyone could manage to fail getting two felons convicted for stabbing a guard in a prison yard, it would be Lean. You’ll do way better with Rahim.”

Together, they sat down on the old sofa, which sank under their weight.

“Looks like you’re the stronger one of us now, where it counts,” Eddie said, with a brief smile.

“I don’t know about that. I wouldn’t be shuffling favours if I was dead in an interrogation room with my windpipe crushed.”

Eddie took a big gulp of beer.

“Don’t say that,” he muttered, glancing at the bruises on Rafael’s neck. They were now several shades of green and brown.

They fell silent for a moment. On the table, Rafael spotted the issue of _Sports Illustrated_ he had bought for Eddie.

“Manny is sorry he won’t see you,” Eddie said.

“So am I.”

Rafael was still a little surprised to find himself not just telling a friendly lie to a parent, but he had never really felt like spending time with the bright boy was much of a burden.

“I wasn’t happy _we_ stopped seeing each other, either, before our less-than-enjoyable meeting in jail,” he added, keeping his tone neutral, but his eyes fixed on Eddie. “Regrettable as the circumstances of our reunion were, I realised how much I missed you as a friend.”

“Rafi…”

Eddie gritted his teeth and looked away, emptied most of his bottle.

“And if there’s something else, aren’t we’re a bit past the age of hushing these things up?”

One of the perks of being an attorney was that you learned to say the most uncomfortable things out loud and not flinch even if your own heart was in your throat, too. Rafael put down his bottle and watched Eddie.

“If you hadn’t scurried off into your apartment, you might have had time to appreciate the fact that I wasn’t exactly attempting to push you off.”

While Rafael could not put a name on what it was that he felt for Eddie at the moment – too involved to pretend to be unaffected, too cautious to allow himself to fall in love like this –, he had a whole lot more affection for him than he’d had for some of the people he had, in the past, slept with or even dated.

Eddie was still silently contemplating his beer bottle. Rafael shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m not leaving here until you say something and you, of all people, know how stubborn I can be. I haven’t slept on your couch in a while, anyway. It’ll be nostalgic.”

Rafael raised his gaze to the ceiling, pretending to wait with more patience than he really had, when suddenly Eddie’s whole weight crashed into his side and pushed him down sideways. Eddie pressed their mouths together again. His hand grabbed at Rafael’s elbow and nailed it to the soft ground of the pillows.

Where he had seemed almost in lockdown when Rafael tried to make him talk, he was all forward movement now, bodies pressing together, his mouth hot on Rafael’s lips and then his jaw, his throat, carefully dodging the bruises and mouthing against his ear instead.

Rafael knew he should have been the one to employ reason, to pull them back and demand Eddie used his mouth to talk rather than to kiss every available inch of skin he could find. What Eddie did, though, went straight down the core of him, setting each nerve on fire. Eddie forced his thighs apart while he leaned in to brush his mouth over Rafael’s lower lip and then tightened his arms around him and dragged him upwards.

“We really should talk,” Rafael breathed out, well aware it was to calm his conscience because with Eddie hauling him to his feet only to kiss him again, he wasn’t much in a talking mood, either.

Eddie, who knew him way too well, grinned and pulled Rafael hard against him. The bastard had noticed that he had the upper hand.

“Not the time for talking, Rafi,” he said, his hand tight around his wrist as he pulled him towards his and Manuel’s shared room. It was a small chamber that Eddie had evidently allowed his son to take over, with posters of cartoon characters all over the walls and toy cars spread out on the ground, which Rafael noted when one of them buried itself into the soft flesh of his foot.

After pulling Rafael’s polo shirt over his head, Eddie pushed him onto the bed, his hands circling Rafael’s wrists again, tighter than he’d expected, which left him staring up at Eddie’s face above him, and reminded him of how they used to wrestle when they were kids. He usually ended up on his back then, too.

But what Eddie had in strength, Rafael had in cunning, so he raised his leg and gently pushed between Eddie’s thighs, rubbing him through the coarse fabric of his jeans while he wound his other leg around Eddie’s, running his toes, still in socks, gently over the back of Eddie’s calf. Eddie groaned, and bit Rafael’s tongue.

Eddie backed off just a little to turn Rafael on his stomach, and Rafael found himself not wanting to admit how Eddie’s dominance had his blood burning in his veins. Considering his work, it seemed almost tasteless to find being manhandled exciting; usually, he wasn’t much for it. And yet, he felt instinctively safe around Eddie, an impulse which had been twined into his personality in his earliest childhood, leaving him with the sure knowledge that Eddie would never push Rafael beyond where he wanted to go because he would never want to make him suffer, and that consequently left Rafael’s boundaries so much wider than they normally were. The realisation of his own trust was frightening, but drowned in the sensation of Eddie’s lips on the nape of his neck, and him dragging his hands over Rafael’s belly.

“I want to fuck you,” Eddie said, against his ear, and though it could have been dirty talk, he stilled his hands on Rafael’s side, hesitating, making it more of a question.

“If you know how to, be my guest. I’m guessing this is your first time with a man?”

Maybe those were too many words for Eddie already, since he didn’t answer immediately, just pushed himself up and reached into the drawer of his bedside table. Behind packages of tissues, some change that clanged against the wooden walls and a Mars bar, he unearthed a condom and lube.

“Yeah, but it’s not like you can’t do this with a woman,” he answered.

Both objects were dropped on the bed somewhere out of Rafael’s line of sight as Eddie draped himself over Rafael again, rutting against him and snaking his arm around Rafael’s shoulders, holding him too tight before he let go to drag his black jeans and briefs downwards, freeing Rafael’s half-hard cock.

When Eddie’s first finger pushed into him, Rafael winced because he was concentrating on craning his neck backwards to receive a searing kiss, and the pressure of Eddie’s hand painfully tight around his forearm. Eddie pushed onwards, undeterred, relentless in his movement and groaning quietly when he felt Rafael buck against his hand.

There was hardly any room to breathe, certainly none to speak as Eddie went in fast and hard and kept adding more fingers until there were four inside of him and Rafael was panting into the pillow and could barely feel his hand from how hard Eddie held on to his wrist.

Finally, Eddie pulled his fingers out and Rafael heard the rustle of plastic as Eddie’s hand released its vice grip on him as well. Then, he was roughly pulled backwards, his backside up in the air and his face landing in the pillow so he was forced to turn it sideways to keep breathing.

“Very dignified,” he complained, shamefully without making an attempt to correct the position.

“ _Eres guapo_ , Rafi.”

Eddie’s voice was all growl, reverberating inside Rafael as he braced himself with his hands. As had been easy to foresee from his behaviour so far, Eddie didn’t go easy. He had a tight grip on Rafael’s waist, one hand still slippery with lube, and Rafael noticed that when he switched off his pride and allowed himself to relax, Eddie’s strength allowed for him to go limp while he let Eddie fuck into him, Eddie holding him up securely by his hips.

The cheap bed creaked with every thrust and Rafael stroked himself in time with the noise, and with Eddie bottoming out inside him. He came fast, surprised by the strength with which the sensation rocked him, the sudden build and release.

One of Eddie’s hands relented its tight grasp on his hip for just one moment to stroke Rafael’s back, which was raising and falling quickly with his breaths, before returning to its place at his side. He doubled the pace, making a small, almost strained noise with every thrust and digging his fingers deep into the soft flesh around Rafael’s waist. When he came, his hips sputtered a little, his cock still deep inside Rafael, who moaned quietly against the pillowcase.

Eddie pulled out quickly to tie a knot into the condom and wrap it in a tissue which landed on the nightstand. Rafael shifted and fell onto his side, his pants and briefs still around his knees. Unlike him, Eddie was dressed, fully now as he pulled up his zipper.

They were quiet for a long moment. Rafael felt sleepy, enveloped by Eddie’s scent, so prominent here with his head on Eddie’s pillow. He sat up anyway and winced at the raw feeling inside him. It had been a while.

Eddie watched him rearrange his clothes and grab his shirt from the floor, where it had covered some of the toy cars.

“Your mother will probably be back from church soon,” Rafael said, after a long moment of silence. “I should head out.”

“Yeah…”

They still needed to talk, but not now, not when Rafael was still scrambling to understand how he had even ended up here tonight. He was just shaking out his shirt when Eddie grabbed Rafael’s elbow and turned his arm around. Where his hand had encircled it, there were angry red marks. Looking down at himself, Rafael found the same to be true where Eddie’s fingers had held on to his hips.

“Those’ll leave bruises,” Eddie said, as he got up, frowning at Rafael. “I wasn’t careful enough.”

“I didn’t tell you to let up,” Rafael pointed out.

“I know. Still…”

Eddie let go off him and ran a hand over his head. He looked at him, slightly forlorn.

“Why am I like this with you?” he asked.

“I’m going to need you to be more specific.”

“Not that I don’t sometimes go a little harder – well, it’s fun, right? But it’s like I don’t know how to treat you anything but rough. I’ve never been that way with women. It was the same when we kissed.”

Rafael thought about it for a moment while he pulled on his shirt, more about how he would put it than what he would say because Eddie was a sort of open book to him and he had a good idea what was going on.

“Maybe it’s because you don’t want to like a man and if you were gentler, or indeed, treated me exactly like your ex-girlfriends or your ex-wife, you’d have to admit that you want me to be your lover,” he suggested.

He chose the word ‘lover’ carefully, since he had no idea what it was that Eddie wanted from him yet. Was Rafael a convenient subject to experiment on, since Eddie knew him well enough to be aware he was both bisexual and very unlikely to talk about him behind his back? Or did Eddie hold him in higher regard than that?

Eddie stared at him for a moment then shrugged his shoulders, nodding his head once.

“I should go,” Rafael said, into the quiet. It looked to him like Eddie really needed time to himself right now.

Eddie brought him to the door, though, and before Rafael could reach for the handle, he took hold of his shoulders with a very light touch and, looking at him for a long moment, gave Rafael a timid kiss on the lips.

“Be safe, Rafi, alright?” he said.

“Call me this time, _compadre_ ,” Rafael answered.


	9. Chapter 9

Eddie did call him the next Friday to ask whether he could come over after work. When Rafael inquired if he had anything planned, there was a brief silence at the other end of the line.

“I want to talk now,” he said.

Rafael smiled. Liv, who was standing at the other end of his office adjusting some papers, raised a brow at him.

Rafael had been up and working since before five because they had taken a case to court today and he had had to plan a cross-examination in the morning because he had fallen asleep on the sofa the evening prior. Still, he found himself unwilling to reject Eddie anyway. His plan had been and theoretically still was that he was going to wait for Eddie to decide what he actually wanted and then whether he would allow himself to get further involved. However, much as he would like it sometimes, feelings were not, after all, as easily controlled as that and he had found himself thinking about Eddie a lot more than strictly necessary that week, of both the passionate sex in Eddie’s way too narrow bed as well as the peck on the lips that had etched itself into his brain much deeper than such a small gesture had any right to. Because of that, he was loath to stifle Eddie’s newfound bravery and very curious as to where this whole matter was headed.

He agreed to Eddie’s idea and must’ve looked a bit too happy, since Liv was regarding him with curiosity now.

“Good news?”

“Just Eddie,” he said. “We’re going to meet up later.”

“You two really found back to each other, didn’t you?”

“That might be the one positive thing to come out of this whole matter,” Rafael agreed. He had lost one friend for good, but it seemed that, if he played his cards right, he would have regained one who had drifted away for a long time.

“I’m just surprised, considering you characterised him as ‘not a genius’.”

“That wasn’t meant to be an insult,” Rafael said. “I’m fairly certain Eddie would agree to it, even more readily than he maybe should. I also said he’s a good man – and I’ve met many fewer good people in my life than I’ve met smart ones.”

The look Liv gave him made Rafael wonder whether he had said too much. It had sounded a little bit like he was gushing.

“What?” he asked, irritably.

“Nothing. With this job, it’s good to know people who make you believe in the better parts of human nature.”

To that, Rafael could agree.

-

Rafael had had just enough time to get changed into a cream-coloured suit, which had the advantage of looking more relaxed as well as not having been on him for fifteen hours, and take off his tie before the doorbell rang. He tucked the fresh, eggshell-blue shirt under his belt and threw a passing glance at himself in the mirror before he walked to the door.

When he opened up, he saw Eddie looking a lot more chic than usual. He actually wore slacks and loafers, though the latter were a little scuffed already, and his usual t-shirt had been replaced by a button-up showing under his jacket. Most surprising of all were the flowers he was holding in his hand.

“ _Hola_ , Rafi,” Eddie said, sounding sheepish.

“ _Buenas noches_. You look good all dressed up,” Rafael answered smoothly, stepping aside to let Eddie in.

Eddie’s expression shifted towards something a little closer to a smile as he followed into his apartment. He stood there, still holding the flowers with their brightly coloured heads downwards. Rafael saw roses in several colours, greenery, a few white snapdragons.

“Are those for me, or are you just carrying them for fun?” he prompted.

“Yeah – well, I wasn’t sure – I wanted to bring something, but now I thought I don’t actually know if you give men flowers.”

“That depends.” Rafael let his words linger a little bit. Eddie was tragically adorable in his fumbling insecurity. “As long as you’re giving them to me, you shouldn’t give them to _other_ men.”

The unhappy anticipation on Eddie’s face dissipated. He held the flowers to him.

“No, just you,” he said.

“Good.”

The roses smelled sweetly and Rafael walked into the kitchen to retrieve a rectangular, see-through glass vase that had been collecting dust in the back of one of his cabinets. He gave it a quick rinse and filled it with water before placing the flowers in it and carrying them back to place them on the table in the living room.

“Thank you, they’re pretty,” he said, glancing at Eddie. “What’s the occasion?”

Eddie looked at him for a long moment.

“I want this to be a date,” he admitted. “So – this seemed right, you know?”

“You bring flowers to a first date? That’s the kind of old-fashionedness I can live with.” Rafael cocked his head. “What else are we going to do?”

“I thought maybe a movie? You’ve probably been working late again and I gotta admit I had a pretty long day myself.”

“You’re back to work already?”

It didn’t surprise Rafael much, but that didn’t mean that he had to like it.

“It wasn’t that bad, after they got the blade out,” Eddie argued.

Rafael rolled his eyes. “You always downplay this kind of thing. Remember when you played a whole game of football on your sprained ankle back in school?”

“We won, though.”

Eddie’s smile grew into a grin.

“And you had to keep your foot still for six weeks afterwards.” With a critical gaze, Rafael adjusted one of the roses, which had tipped itself a bit too far forward. “Either way, yes. I haven’t been to the cinema in…” He considered. “It must have been a year, at least. Probably longer.”

“How does that even work?” Eddie asked, heading for the door.

“Well, my acquaintances prefer the theatre or the opera… maybe I’ll make you go there sometime,” he teased.

Eddie opened the door for him. “Would you rather go there?”

“No. I’m sure we’ll find a movie we like. Besides, there is something to be said for the privacy of darkness.”

It was also strategically sound to play it Eddie’s way for this first date. Rafael knew he conceded more than he usually would have, made himself give excuses for going easy on Eddie as he felt his way through his, presumably, first date with a man, but their history was so long and important that it was difficult for him to sabotage him. Also, and this was harder to admit, he himself would be disappointed if this didn’t work out.

When Eddie opened the door to the passenger’s side for him, Rafael chuckled.

“Flowers, and now this? Who’d have thought you’d turn into a gentleman?”

“Ey, I know how to treat… uhm, a date.”

Rafael knew that Eddie had wanted to say ‘a lady’, but, aside from a slightly quirked eyebrow, he let it slide.

“How is Manuel doing?” Rafael asked, opting for a safe topic as he strapped himself in.

“Good,” Eddie said, and as usual, the mention of his son brought a little smile to his lips. He turned the key in the ignition. “He wants you to come over to continue with that Harry Potter book you bought.”

“He could read it himself.”

“That’s what I told him, but he said it’s not the same.”

It was strange to think that Manuel was actually insisting on being read to by Rafael, but he might have to face the fact that his experiences with Manuel were now exceeding those of a distant family friend. He had some responsibility regarding that child lest he became another adult vanishing out of his life. And if he started dating Eddie…

Rafael resolutely pushed the thought away. Better to concentrate on the first step before he panicked about the tenth. Considering how inconsistent he had been, Eddie was a definite flight risk still.

“Did you have a movie in mind?”

“Not really,” Eddie said, with half a smile. “I don’t know what you like now, Rafi.”

“Let’s go with what you like, then.”

“Well, there’s still all the horror movies left over from Halloween. One’s called ‘The Forgotten’. I head it’s pretty good.”

The last time that Rafael had willingly sat down to watch a horror movie in full had been some time in his mid-twenties, but that made the idea all the more appealing. With Eddie, it was easier to indulge in things that he had enjoyed when he was younger and which had been slowly filtered out of his personality to match an image he had enjoyed building, but that had cut out some elements which seemed unfitting for no other but strategic reasons.

“Sounds fun. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched one. Are you hoping that I’ll be looking for safety in your arms?” Rafael asked with a smirk.

“I don’t think I’ll get lucky there,” Eddie said, after a half of a second in which he seemed to work with the fact that he’d just been blatantly flirted with by a man. “I remember that you always used to force yourself to look at the screen, even when you were about to piss your pants.”

“And you once made a point out of eating your spaghetti bolognese while we were watching the Texas Chain Saw Massacre on TV,” Rafael remembered, with sudden clarity, and had to chuckle as he saw them sitting there on the couch in his mind, no older than thirteen, Alex and Rafael uneasily and loudly pointing out flaws in how the movie was shot and how unrealistic the story was to distract themselves from the fact that they were frightened as hell, and Eddie trying to seem unaffected while shovelling pasta in his mouth. “You looked pretty pale by the end of the movie.”

Eddie laughed.

“Let’s see how tough you still are after so many years of fancy opera,” he teased. “Maybe you’ll be hiding at my shoulder after all.”

-

Eddie insisted on inviting him and bought popcorn and coke for them before they shuffled into a small cinema that was empty but for a few teenagers who probably shouldn’t be there and an elderly couple in the back.

“Did they teach you how to perform first aid at Rikers?” Rafael asked, quietly, glancing over his shoulder at the older couple. “Just in case there’ll be any coronaries.”

Eddie followed his gaze and grinned. “Hey, you don’t know, Rafi. Could be they’re here to make out.”

“Either way, a strain on the pacemakers,” Rafael joked, as he wrestled his way out of his coat and deposited it on the seat next to him. “Although I suppose the kids in the first row are probably saying the same things about us.”

He hadn’t considered, in his carefree mood, that this was acknowledging that he and Eddie were on a public date, which some people might indeed identify as such, and that Eddie might not be ready to consider that. Fortunately, Eddie was not as prone to overthinking every word out of someone else’s and his own mouth and just grinned as he balanced the popcorn on his knees, waiting for Rafael to sit down to hand him his cup.

“Yeah, we’re the old men now. But at least we got into the cinema without sneaking through the fire escape,” he said.

“The perks of growing grey.”

Rafael settled in next to him and reached over to get a handful of popcorn just as the lights dimmed. It was dark when Eddie shifted beside him and put his arm around the backrest of the chair, lingering there for a moment before he let his fingers drop onto Rafael’s shoulder.

The movie was a ponderous production using all the dubious charms of a Queen Anne-style house and a grey October in Maine to its advantage. As the titular Forgotten appeared for the first time, unaccompanied by a music sting and thus almost more surprising, looking over the protagonist’s shoulder through a window, Rafael jumped a little. Immediately, Eddie’s arm tightened around him. Whether it was strategy or instinct he couldn’t tell, but Eddie didn’t let go anymore and Rafael didn’t try to shake him off. While the terrorised family were somewhat clumsily developing their characters, Rafael turned to Eddie and kissed him on the mouth.

“This doing it for you?” Eddie whispered, grinning.

“It’s been over twenty years since I last made out with someone in a cinema,” Rafael gave back. “I was feeling nostalgic.”

“That wasn’t making out.”

Eddie leaned over and cupped the back of Rafael’s head with his hand. They only parted when the movie ruined the mood by showing the rather decomposed body of the Forgotten being dragged out of a swamp.

When they left the cinema, Rafael blinked into the bright lights of the hallway, only noticing now, when it was demanded of him to move, how tired he really was. Sucking the last gulp of cola out of the cup, he threw it in the trash with the empty popcorn bag and waited for Eddie to sort out his jacket before he headed for the exit. In the light, Eddie was only walking shoulder to shoulder, but at least he did that being a little too close. Since Rafael had never been one to enjoy PDA where people could actually see him, as opposed to a dark cinema, this suited him fine for now.

“Did you like it?” Eddie asked.

“The movie or you?”

Eddie smiled, looking only a little embarrassed this time. “The movie,” he said, and, finally, managed a smirk, “I _know_ you like me.”

“Humility is a Christian virtue, you know?” Rafael said. “I enjoyed the movie more than I guessed I would,” he added. “I thought with all the everyday human horror I get to witness in detail at my job, I would be tired of seeing bad things happen, but… it didn’t have much of a connection.”

“The people we work with, or work on, or whatever, they can follow us home if we’re unlucky. It’s more fun to creep yourself out, knowing there’s never actually gonna be ghosts climbing out of the wardrobe.”

Rafael nodded his head, not surprised to hear the thoughts he hadn’t quite been able to put in words right now coming out of Eddie’s mouth. People always used to think the two of them were terribly different and in some regards they were no doubt right, but there had also always been levels on which they’d understood each other. To know he hadn’t lost that made him want to kiss Eddie again, but he was not quite so delirious with sleep that he was going to do that in the middle of a cinema entrance hall.

He followed Eddie over the parking lot to the car. It was cold enough to make him shiver and when the car heater came on with an unhealthy rattling noise, Rafael sank back against the seat and enjoyed the stream of stuffy, warm air that the car blew in his direction. The city passed them by in a blur of light and muffled noise.

Rafael only realised that he must’ve nodded off when Eddie shook his shoulder and he found himself sitting up straight to look at a his own apartment building.

“We’re home,” Eddie said, with a fond smile.

Rafael rubbed his eyes, trying to stab through the fog in his head. Since when did he fall asleep outside of a closed apartment or hotel room? That hadn’t happened to him since he had been an actual child – he was really too paranoid.

“Uh – I’m sorry,” he said, startled.

He wasn’t able to hide how much the thought bothered him, in hindsight – and that wasn’t even taking into consideration that he had fallen asleep on his date.

“It’s fine, it happens to Manny all the time,” Eddie said and he reached over and ruffled Rafael’s hair like he often did with his son’s. Though Rafael knocked his hand away, he allowed a brief smile.

“Can I make it up to you? You could come upstairs for some coffee. That’ll hopefully wake me up, too.”

Since they had already had sex rough enough to leave Rafael with now-fading bruises, holding to the three-dates rule seemed very pointless.

The look on Eddie’s face showed that he was tempted. However, he shook his head and, dragging Rafael in by the back of his head, gave him a quick kiss.

“You look dead tired, Rafi. Next time?”

“Next time,” Rafael agreed, with a slow nod. Since he had fallen asleep on Eddie, he had no grounds to argue, and it was true he’d rather use the bed to have a nap. He kissed him once more. Eddie’s lips were cool and sweet with popcorn.

“We didn’t have many serious conversations,” he pointed out, licking his lips as he drew back. “Didn’t you say you wanted to talk?”

“Next time. Or the one after that.”

Rafael had to smile, even though he knew he shouldn’t encourage him.

“Next time,” he repeated, too, with a little more gravity.

Before he climbed out of the door, he turned back to Eddie.

“Get home safe and tell Manuel hello from me.”

“Will do.”

Rafael noticed that Eddie waited until he had reached the door of his apartment building and unlocked it before he let the car’s motor purr back to life.


	10. Chapter 10

“Who is going to head your case?” A.D.A. Ramin asked, sipping from her Styrofoam cup. They had found a spot on a bench in Maple Grove Park, which was down the street from the Queens District Attorney’s Office. Though the park was fenced in on both sides by unromantically busy streets, the November sun was winking rather picturesquely through the last dry leaves in the trees.

“I’ve asked Paula Hammerschmidt if she’d do me the favour.”

“Hammerschmidt…” Ramin’s arched brows pulled into a frown. “Wasn’t she the one who prosecuted the case of that guard who was shot in Rikers last year?”

“Exactly. She has experience in matters like this.”

“I don’t,” Ramin said, honestly. “So I was surprised you vouched for me, considering you and Mr. Garcia are such good friends. Not that I’m not glad for the opportunity,” she was quick to add.

Rafael knew that since she’d transferred to Queens, she had mostly been working small-time cases, but Rafael had seen her diligence and ambition when she was still in Manhattan. A relatively clear-cut but sensitive case was the kind of low hurdle that he expected her to jump with ease. If she got a small career boost out of it then she was certainly one of those who deserved it. He’d also be lying if he’d said that he hadn’t bet on the fact that her young age meant that his inevitable meddling would be seen as mentoring by her, which had thankfully proven to be true.

“In the end, Rikers is just the circumstance. Getting your fingers into that system can be a bit tricky, but as long as you’re not prosecuting the guards, they’ll be all too happy to help you. Of course, the defence will try to level that against you and make the jury believe Rikers is not trustworthy – and that Eddie isn’t, either. They might bring up his involvement with Alex Muñoz, too.”

“I’ll have to plan for that. Do you think I could talk to Ms. Hammerschmidt about how she is approaching your case? Mr. Garcia is involved in that as well.”

“I’ll text you her number,” Rafael said with a nod, glancing at his watch before quickly emptying his coffee. “But I have to go. I’m actually meeting up with Eddie now, in case you want me to tell him anything?”

“That’s fine. I’ll see him tomorrow, anyway. Thanks for taking the time, Mr. Barba.”

“Believe me, I’m not selfless. I have a vested interest in seeing the man who stabbed Eddie locked behind bars for a long time.”

The only thing that still worried him was that behind bars was exactly where Eddie went every day of his life, too.

-

“Okay, so if an animal that has a backbone is a vertebrate, which one of these is not one?”

Rafael pointed at the short list of animals again, watching Manuel knit his brow.

“I don’t get it.”

“Well, see – the spine only moves certain ways, right? Thank you, Eddie.” Rafael interrupted himself to receive a cup of coffee from Eddie, who vanished back into the kitchen. “You can’t curl all the way into a ball, can you?”

Manuel, of course, had to try before he nodded his head, which was still hanging between his knees.

“Now think about how a worm moves. Do you think it has a spine?”

“Probably not?” Manuel guessed.

“That’s right. And what about the jellyfish. You can even look through those. Are there any bones in there?”

“No, they’re just – jelly.”

“And a dog? Can dogs move like worms or jellyfish?”

“No… I don’t think so. They’re not as, uh…”

“Flexible?” Rafael suggested.

“Yeah.”

Manuel leaned over the paper to place big, emphatic Xs next to the jellyfish and the worm, and circle the dog.

“What’s this word here?” he asked, pointing at the short text under the question.

“‘Tetrapod’? That means having for limbs. Four legs like a dog, or two arms and two legs, like a human.”

“So I’m a tetrapod?”

“A tetrapod vertebrate, yes.”

“Papi, I’m a tetrapod vertebrate,” Manuel announced, as Eddie came back into the living room, holding the phone. He smiled.

“Sounds interesting, mijo. Angelo’s mom is asking if you wanna come over for dinner. Are you about done here?”

Manuel agreed vigorously, and Eddie glanced at Rafael for confirmation. He nodded his head.

“Alright, you can go,” Eddie said, running his fingers through Manuel’s hair before he allowed him to storm to the door and get his sneakers. Hopping on one foot as he pulled on his shoe, Manuel smiled at Rafael.

“Thanks for helping me with my homework,” he said. Once he had put on his jacket, he returned to give Rafael a hug. To his surprise, Eddie, after also being embraced, stayed seated in the armchair as Manuel left.

“Is it fine for him to walk alone?” he asked, when the door had closed behind the boy.

Eddie chuckled.

“It’s a two-minute walk, Rafi, and there’s still some light out. We used to run all over the neighbourhood until after dark when we were his age.”

“I suppose so,” Rafael admitted. And after all, it wasn’t going to do a child any good to coddle it until it forgot what self-sufficiency even meant. However, with his job, he caught himself thinking that every moment Manuel spent on his lonesome around potentially dangerous strangers (or teachers, or acquaintances, or babysitters, or…) should be avoided.

“If he’s not there in five minute’s time, Angelo’s mom will call me,” Eddie told Rafael. “But it’s good of you to worry.”

“Of course I do. He’s your son.”

Eddie picked up the paper they’d been working on.

“Tetrapod vertebrate,” he read out. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Neither did your son. He doesn’t seem to sleep through class, so I wonder why his teacher doesn’t spend more time introducing these concepts.”

Of course, it seemed like the grammar teacher whose homework he’d gone through the first time he had helped Manuel had been similarly uninterested in doing anything but hand out a worksheet and call it a day.

“It’s not a great school,” Eddie agreed.

“And that means four-limbed creatures with spines, by the way, and I probably taught you that before,” Rafael added.

Eddie grinned and put the paper down.

“I didn’t have to pay attention in biology. We sat next to each other in that class until senior year, remember? My exams were always good.”

“I feel like there is some sort of cautionary tale along the lines of ‘teach a man to fish’ here.”

Thoughtfully, Eddie looked down at Manuel’s biology book.

“I wish I’d have taken school more serious,” he admitted. “I mean, for now I can still help Manuel with most things, but it’s not gonna be long now that I won’t even understand what he’s doing in class.”

“It won’t be that fast,” Rafael said. Maybe Eddie wasn’t all that book smart, but he had been told that so often that he was now rating his own intelligence much lower than it really was. “Besides, I’m still here. I can’t pretend I wouldn’t capitulate before higher math, but I think I can still boast of an elementary school level in most subjects.”

“Yeah… you’ll stay around,” Eddie said, getting up from his arm chair to sit down next to Rafael. “Right?”

“That’s the plan,” Rafael agreed.

“Gives me more opportunities to keep people from strangling you, too.”

“A full-time occupation, I assure you,” Rafael said raising an eyebrow. “But that’s not the reason you’re my friend and it wasn’t before, either. I didn’t just need a bodyguard. Although let’s not pretend I wasn’t thankful, and very lucky, that I had one.”

To put emphasis on what he’d said, Rafael placed his hand on Eddie’s arm.

“I talked to Ramin today, by the way. I think she’s going to manage this case rather well. If she can get it through without a hitch, it’ll be good for her career. It seems to me she’s the kind to do her best, anyway, but it’s usually prudent to find people who have that extra kind of motivation,” Rafael said with a brief smile.

“Too bad you can’t be my A.D.A.,” Eddie said.

“It is. Sadly, I am much too _involved_ with the victim.”

Finally, Eddie leaned over to kiss him. Only when their lips met did Rafael allow himself to admit how much he had been hoping for a continuation of their aborted date night. Luckily, Eddie didn’t seem in favour of returning to his protocol of total silence and inactivity regarding the matter, either. Rafael ran his hand over Eddie’s head, feeling the stubble of short, bristly hair scratch his palm.

“Are you growing it out again?”

“Yeah, I think so. Would you like that?”

Rafael liked most that Eddie wanted his opinion. He just shrugged his shoulders, half-smiling.

“I like both looks, but your image certainly is more… thug-ish when its shaved. As long as it’s not that shoulder-length look you wore back in the eighties, I’ll be satisfied.”

Grinning, Eddie put his arms around Rafael.

“Careful, I’ve got some old photos lying around here that could get rid of your reputation as a fancy dresser real fast.”

“Are you blackmailing me, Mr. Garcia?”

He could feel that Eddie was about to tip him backwards again, but this time, Rafael was faster, climbing onto his lap instead. It had not gone without his notice that, last time, Eddie had pretty much done just about everything that you could while sleeping with a man to forget that he _was_ indeed sleeping with a man – leaving him half-dressed, turning him on his stomach, Rafael didn’t think Eddie had even touched Rafael’s cock. While he was willing to believe that most of that composition had been the result of the heated passion of the moment, he wasn’t going to let every encounter play out that way.

“What’re you gonna give me if I keep quiet?” Eddie asked, with a playful smile.

“I might be convinced to take part in one or two improper acts. What did you have in mind?”

“Way too much…” Eddie dug his fingers into Rafael’s thighs. “Especially since I had to let you go after the cinema.”

“You could’ve come upstairs.”

“Maybe next time you’re so tired, I’ll stay the night and fuck you in the morning.”

Though Eddie was clearly attempting to sound macho, Rafael had seen the moment in which he’d collected his courage – not to ask to fuck him, he assumed, because Rafael had shown himself to be quite partial to allowing that, but for the in its own way more intimate act of spending the night.

“That sounds like a good idea.”

Eddie kissed his jaw, his hands tightening on Rafael’s sides.

“I’m not usually – I mean, I think I’ve been into some men,” Eddie confessed, against Rafael’s throat. “Not as often as women, though.”

It sounded honest enough not to be the perplexing but still sometimes all-too-real attempt at denying one’s own attraction to men while actually in the act of undressing one, which Rafael had also been confronted with before. Apparently Eddie really was just trying to navigate his own feelings.

“As long as you’re attracted to me, everything is fine. I tend more towards men than women. It’s not always fifty-fifty.”

“Yeah, I am. You’re hot,” Eddie growled and kissed Rafael on the mouth, tugging gently at Rafael’s tie.

“I do my best. Was I your first man?”

“I made out with one before when I was really drunk, but that was long ago. Twenty years, I guess. I always made sure it never happened again.”

But since he was impatiently unbuttoning Rafael’s shirt now, it didn’t seem like he still had that self-control.

“So I took your virginity,” Rafael teased as he pulled Eddie’s shirt over his head.

Eddie smiled at that. “Well, it was good it was you,” he said, absent-mindedly, as he finally slipped Rafael’s shirt down from his shoulders, leaving only his loose tie.

It was the first time Rafael actually saw Eddie shirtless, despite the fact that they had slept together before. He had not expected that Eddie was still just as in shape as he used to be when Rafael was jealous of him at sixteen, watching him undress after gym class. In comparison, Rafael did look very much like the middle-aged attorney that he was.

“ _Te gusta_?” Eddie asked, with a smug smile, dragging Rafael’s hand over his own hard stomach.

“I need to watch my diet if I want to cut a good figure next to you, it seems,” Rafael said, scooting back on Eddie’s thighs to kiss his chest.

“Not for me,” Eddie said, digging his fingers into the meat of Rafael’s ass, which he took as an implicit comment on what Eddie thought of a little extra. Well then, Rafael was not going to talk himself into complexes if it was unnecessary, he would much rather concentrate on the rather tempting display before him.

He ran his hands over Eddie’s body and then pressed their chests together, sliding forward again as he kissed him to bounce gently on his lap. The sensation gained him a low rumble from the back of Eddie’s throat and Rafael’s own half-hard cock, still trapped by briefs and dress pants, was leaning against Eddie’s naked stomach. Eddie was still busy kissing every inch of Rafael’s naked shoulders when Rafael decided to test whether he was actually willing to confront he was sleeping with a man. No need to be too pedagogical about it, however…

“Touch me, please,” Rafael purred in Eddie’s ear, gently putting Eddie’s hand on his still-covered cock. Eddie raised his head a little, but then nodded it, his chin bumping against Rafael’s shoulder. Slowly, he pulled down the zipper and, after another moment’s hesitation, pulled out his cock.

Rafael gave a much deeper sigh than was strictly needed as a response – good behaviour needed to be rewarded, after all –, rubbing himself against Eddie’s fingers while he licked around the shell of his ear. This seemed to be motivation enough for Eddie to start moving his hand. Even a supposedly straight man like him was usually not too clumsy doing what he had done for himself many times before and Eddie was easily encouraged by small, deliberate sounds Rafael made into his ear. Meanwhile, Rafael shifted back again so that he could finally take Eddie in hand, too, looking down with reddened cheeks at their cocks.

“You’re bigger than me,” Eddie said.

Huffing a breathless laugh, Rafael kissed him, amused by the fact that Eddie didn’t even hide that he’d made the comparison.

“You’ve already got all the muscle, you have to leave me at least one meaningless outer mark of virile masculinity to beat you in,” Rafael said.

If Eddie had an answer, it was lost when Rafael wrapped his hand around both of them and began working his fingers, rubbing the semen leaking from Eddie’s manhood over them to smooth the movement and twisting his fingers expertly around the heads of their cocks. He knew a few more tricks than just aping what he did under the blanket.

This time, Eddie seemed to make an effort not to let himself be too rough. When his fingers dug hard into Rafael’s sides, he smoothed his palms over the spots, as if that could calm the angry skin, and gave him a kiss as Rafael sped up his hand.

“Tissues,” Rafael demanded against his lips, “I’m sorry, but I can’t sacrifice this suit, not even for you.

Eddie rolled his eyes, smiled.

“My shirt,” he just answered.

Eddie came first into the fabric of his shirt, which Rafael had picked up from the couch. When Rafael kept stroking them, Eddie watched him for a moment, then knocked gently against Rafael’s wrist, letting his own hand take the place. He was less practised than Rafael in getting another man off, but the eager look of concentration on his face as he glanced down at Rafael’s cock pushed Rafael over the edge much too fast.

After cleaning themselves up with Eddie’s shirt once more and balling it up, they staid as they were for a moment, Rafael perching on Eddie’s lap, his arms draped around his neck, their heads leaning together. Rafael could have fallen asleep like this, with Eddie’s hands lazily stroking Rafael’s calves resting on the worn, yielding sofa cushions, if the doorbell hadn’t torn them from their lazy stupor.

“What did you do?” Manuel asked them, after he had been handed over to the two hastily dressed friends by Angelo’s mother.

“We just talked about our jobs,” Rafael said with a smile.

“Uh-huh,” Manuel answered, looking as if they had revealed themselves to be just as boring as Rafael imagined most adults seemed to Manuel.

“What about you and Angelo?”

While Eddie ushered him into the bathroom, Manuel began his story about the game they had thought of, which included cowboys, knights, and the collection of toy soldiers Angelo apparently had been gifted by his godfather. The plot did not become more coherent by being told through a mouth full with a toothbrush, but Rafael doubted he would have been able to follow it, anyway. Manuel didn’t need more encouragement than his and Eddie’s occasional noise of interest, however, as they leaned in the bathroom doorway.

“Can you read some to me?” Manuel asked, as he returned from his room dressed in the same pyjamas with toys robots on them that he’d worn for Rafael’s first visit. “I wanna go on with Harry Potter.”

“Sure, I can read a little,” Rafael said. “Unless your father says it’s too late…”

He knew he wouldn’t, but he had always liked teasing people, from which Manuel was not exempt just because he was small. Eddie played along, pretending to think while Manuel jumped up and down.

“Please, papi!”

“I don’t know, do you think you should, Rafi?”

“I think a few pages, papi,” Rafael said, adding the term of endearment with a little smile. Eddie gently pushed him towards the bedroom.

While Rafael read out how Harry went on his adventure finding the train to Hogwarts, Eddie listened as intently as his son. He was sitting on the other bed, watching Rafael perching on the edge of Manuel’s in silence until the chapter ended and Rafael put the book down. Rafael pulled Manuel’s blanket up to his chin before he said goodnight.

It was half past eight by the time Rafael got ready to leave, wrapping himself up in his scarf and coat to brave the bitter cold outside. Eddie had come to the door in his new shirt.

“I don’t think it’s a sin,” he said, without prompting.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t think it could be a sin that we’re… I used to think that. But you’re so good with Manuel – and I’m happy around you. If this is how sinning works, I don’t really get it. You haven’t brought anything bad to me or my family.”

“We’re not sinners, Eddie.” Rafael smiled lop-sidedly. “Well, not for this, at least. This is as normal as could be. Just two people who like each other. I don’t see how something so commonplace could disturb a divine being.”

Eddie pulled him into a hug.


	11. Chapter 11

“Do you know when your case will go to trial?“

Rafael shook his head, taking a sip of his coffee. “No, but I probably won’t have to wait too long. All the cases related to these Mafiosi garner a lot of media attention, so the D.A.’s office will want it to be known that they prosecuted quickly. Besides, there are cameras in the interrogation room, so things are clear-cut.”

“If they weren’t already stuck in there for life, they would be now. Hammerschmidt doesn’t play around.”

“Trust me, I’m not encouraging her to.”

Liv put aside her cutlery. They had gone to lunch together since Rafael had been over at the station.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

Rafael knew that she had probably waited until he was full and thus happier to regal him with the emotional questions. They had never been his favourite.

“I’m fine,” he said, and rolled his eyes at her questioning gaze, “trust me. I actually have a recent – distraction.”

“What is that?”

Maybe it was childish that he was itching to tell someone, but it had been a long while since he had been so stupidly in love that he felt like bragging about his relationship, and he thought that since he and Liv were friends, it was her duty to indulge his foolishness from time to time.

“Eddie and I have gotten a lot closer. We have actually been going out for a few weeks.”

“You mean he’s your boyfriend?”

Liv forgot the glass in her hand and the dumbfounded surprise on her face amused Rafael.

“Yes. And it does make the case easier. He’s always kept an eye on me, so even knowing that he wouldn’t stand a chance in a firefight with angry Mafiosi, and considering how little I want him there, it’s – instinct that I’m calm around him,” he admitted.

Liv seemed to think this information over for a moment.

“Just make sure that he doesn’t drag you into anything shady. I know he wasn’t guilty of what he was accused of, but he’s still committed crimes.”

“Trust me, Eddie is the sort of person who _gets_ dragged into things, not the other way around. Of course, now he won’t be because he’s with me and I’ll make sure he stays on the straight and narrow. It’s what he wants, anyway. The whole Alex debacle taught him a lesson.”

This seemed to satisfy Liv. Finally, she smiled.

“I’m happy for you,” she said. “Was there anything there when you were teenagers… ? You told me you were just friends.”

“No.” Rafael hesitated, thinking about Eddie telling him that he’d seen him and Alex, and how it had come up right before the evening he had kissed him for the first time. “Maybe there could have been, but Eddie was much too wrapped up in his father’s dogma to be that honest about himself.”

“Does that mean you will get in trouble with his family?”

“Well, he’s told his mother, who apparently wasn’t enthused, but she likes me well enough and she was never quite the brand of unpleasant Christian that Eddie’s father used to be. I think she can get used to the thought. My mother eventually did and she wasn’t a fan of the concept at first, either. It’s a different generation, but thankfully, many aren’t completely unreasonable.”

“And the kid’s mother?”

“At the moment, still MIA, though apparently she has a habit of calling around Christmas and ruining the boy’s holidays by telling him she might come over and not doing it. If she’d now have complaints, I would have a long list of more damaging things she has done to him than us exposing him to the fact that different sexualities exist.”

Liv nodded her head. “Not an easy situation you came into.”

That was true; Rafael had not been this busy in a long while, trying to juggle his job, his responsibilities as a partner to Eddie and the relationship he was building with Manuel. However, it did feel so much more rewarding than coming home to an empty apartment.

“Good things are never for free,” he said, with a slim smile.

-

“I heard Alex struck a plea deal,” Eddie said, as they walked past the exhibition windows in the Bronx Zoo Mouse House. Manuel had run ahead to the chinchilla exhibition while Eddie and Rafael were trailing behind.

“That’s right,” Rafael said, watching what the plaque next to the window proclaimed to be a short-eared elephant shrew vanish under a small log.

“You think he’ll be back in politics eventually?”

“He wouldn’t be the first one to make it past the minor inconvenience of a conviction for a misdemeanour and some white collar charges,” Rafael said. “I don’t know if he’ll run for mayor again, but I doubt we’ve seen the last of him. His support in the community is still strong.”

“Yelina is still with him, too,” Eddie said, frowning at a particularly fat grey gerbil watching them from behind a bushel of leathery leaves. “I didn’t think she’d stay.”

“Maybe she loves him. Maybe it’s the sunk-cost fallacy.”

“What’s that?”

“It means you keep investing in something and think it’s warranted to do so because you’ve already sunk so many resources into the project. If you gave up, you’d have to write off all of them. Of course, this makes you lose sight of how much more you’re losing overall if you just press on even though it’s futile. It’s a finance thing, but it works with people, too.”

“Yeah, you don’t give up on a marriage with kids easily,” Eddie said, shaking his head, and put his hand between Rafael’s shoulder blades to push him towards the chinchillas, where Manuel was waiting for them. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have started with that. I don’t wanna think about Alex today.”

“It’s not like we can ever cut him out,” Rafael said, and, even after everything that had happened, he didn’t think he’d want to. Little as he liked it, Alex was still a big part of his childhood; hell, he’d probably had some significant amount of influence on how both of them had turned out and vice versa. “But you’re right, no need to dwell on him right now. I had something hopefully more pleasant I wanted to talk to you about, anyway.”

However, they were interrupted by Manuel loudly pointing out two chinchillas which were chasing each other around in their enclosure. Only when Manuel realised that there were foxes at the end of the hallway did they have another moment for themselves, since the boy darted forward again.

“I was talking to Sergeant Hillem. He’s an officer at the Supreme Court and he told me he’s looking for new recruits at the moment. I might’ve mentioned I had a friend who has experience as a C.O. .”

“A court officer?” Eddie glanced at him.

“It’s the kind of job you’ve got the right CV for, but it’s one you can do past fifty. Also, the last court officers in New York died in 2001, which is a much better ratio than Rikers,” Rafael said, too fast for Eddie to interrupt him, “the pay should at least match your current level and the shifts have more humane times.”

“I know, I’ve looked into it a while ago,” Eddie said, to Rafael’s surprise. “It sounded like a good thing… I mean, if something happened to me at work, then Manuel wouldn’t have either parent anymore and I really don’t wanna do that to him.”

Rafael nodded his head, quite happy to find that Eddie had already happened on one of the arguments that he had planned to ensnare him with.

“But I’d have to go to an academy for 14 weeks and I wouldn’t have a salary for that time, so I can’t.”

“Well, that’s only a little more than three months, isn’t it?” Rafael waved his hand. “If you’re interested in doing it, we’ll find a way.”

“How’s that supposed to work? We really don’t have a lot saved up…”

“I do,” Rafael said. “You’re dating an attorney, take advantage of it. I don’t make as much as my colleagues in the private sector, but it’s enough to support a few more people, especially if it’s just for a while.”

Eddie stared at him. “You can’t do that,” he said, sounding unsure.

“Sure I can. If it means you’re in a safer job with better hours, I can help you out for a few months. It’s not a big deal, Eddie.”

“I can’t take money from you.”

Rafael understood that Eddie had been raised into a traditional mindset and the idea that he wasn’t the one providing for his family was difficult for him, but this was definitely one of those cases where Rafael had to gently steamroll someone’s feelings for their own good in the long run. Placing his hand on Eddie’s arm, he turned to smile at him.

“You’re not, I’m giving it to you. And if it really bothers you, we can work out some way for you to pay me back, though I don’t need you to,” he said, with the full intention of never being held to this. “But something small like this shouldn’t be why you don’t get to switch to a job that’s better for you. I mean, you were stabbed. That’s not a joke.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Eddie said, haltingly. “And you said you know a guy?”

“He’d be happy to have you over for an interview, yes. You’ve got a good track record as a C.O. .” And whatever unsavoury media news had surfaced during the election, Rafael had given his words that there was a good reason Eddie hadn’t been convicted (which was, after all, not a lie).

“Papi! Rafi!”

Manuel had found the foxes and their attention was drawn away from career talk once more. Before he went to join Manuel in front of the cage, he kissed Eddie’s cheek.

“Think about it,” he asked him.

Eddie’s smile was stuck between fond and exasperated. “You damn well know you win every argument we have, anyway, Rafi.”

Rafael just chuckled and pulled him forward towards the fennecs.

-

“What are you doing?”

Rafael could not fault Liv for her incredulity. If someone had told him he would one day be using a lunch break in a case briefing for scouring Amazon for superhero merchandise, he wouldn’t have believed it, either.

“I asked Eddie what Manuel would like for Christmas and he said he likes Spiderman. Now I’m stuck in some sort of ad-fuelled, red-and-blue hell.”

Liv pulled up a chair to sit down next to him.

“How about a lunch box?” she said.

“Isn’t that a bit too useful? I don’t want to be the guy who gives socks for Christmas to a child,” Rafael said.

“Trust me, if it has Spiderman on it, he won’t care. And you could always put sweets in there. That’s what a mom from Noah’s kindergarten group did for her older girl when she gave her a gym bag for her birthday,” Liv said.

“You have important insider information, I see. Very helpful,” Rafael muttered, typing ‘lunch box spiderman’ into the search box and adding the most official looking one to his shopping cart. “I should find a few comics, too. Maybe I can lure Manny towards reading books like that.”

“Look at you,” Liv said, bemused.

“What will I see?”

“Someone who is working quite hard on becoming a step-dad.” As she got up, she patted his shoulder and smiled. “If things continue this way, I’ll have you over to babysit Noah soon.”

Rafael rolled his eyes at her and tried to ignore his heart skipping a beat. Here was an idea he had not guessed he would be prepared to think through. However, as he thought of last weekend, when he had strode through the Bronx zoo with Eddie and Manuel, the boy between them, holding one of their hands each, and Eddie smiling at him over Manuel’s head, he realised that the thought of a family was maybe not so scary after all. Not if it was with Eddie; he could always count on him.


End file.
